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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




JOHN RUSKIN 



From a photograph 



SESAME AND LILIES 



BY 



JOHN RUSKIN 




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With Introduction and Notes 
by 

MRS. LOIS G. HUFFORD 

Teacher of English Literature in the High School of 
Indianapolis, Indiana 





GINN & COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON 









Copies 


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OCT, 


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COPY 8. 

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Copyright, 1894, 1905 
By LOIS G. HUFFORD 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

55-8 



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GINN & COMPANY • PRO- 
PRIETORS • BOSTON • U.S.A. 






CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction vii 

List of Collected Works ...... xxvii 

Bibliographical References xxix 

Sesame and Lilies: — 

Introductory ... 3 

Of Kings' Treasuries . . . . . 8 

Annotations ... 60 

Of Queens' Gardens 65 

Annotations . , .104 



Ruskin's Life Purpose as Stated by Himself. 



" All my work is to help those who have eyes and see not." 

" I had no thought but of learning more, and teaching what truth 
I knew — for the student's sake, not my own fame's." 

" My purpose is to insist on the necessity as well as the dignity 
of an earnest, faithful, loving study of nature as she is." 

" The end of my whole professorship " (at Oxford) " would be 
accomplished, — if only the English nation could be made to under- 
stand that the beauty which is to be a joy forever, must be a joy 
for all." 



INTRODUCTION. 



A half-century has elapsed since the first volume of 
Modem Painters challenged the thoughtful attention of the 
public by its bold questioning of accepted standards in taste 
and art. 

The appeal to the artist (Turner) with which the volume 
closes reveals the spirit in which Ruskin's own work has 
always been done : " We desire that he should follow out 
his own thoughts and intents of heart, without reference to 
any human authority. But we suggest that those thoughts 
may be seriously and loftily given. We pray him to utter 
nothing lightly — to do nothing regardlessly. He stands 
upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the 
universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. 
Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a 
lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind 
be both hymn and prophecy, — adoration to the deity, — 
revelation to mankind." 

In all his criticisms of art and life, Mr. Ruskin's attitude 
has been that of reverent love for truth as revealed in nature 
and in the human heart ; his purpose has been to open 
men's eyes to that truth, and so to lead them to bring their 
own lives into harmony through obedience to the eternal 
laws of righteousness. 

At five years of age, the child John Ruskin is said to 
have preached to an imaginary congregation a sermon, the 



Vlll INTRODUCTION. 

burden of which was, " People, be dood ! Dod will love 
you if you are dood. People, be dood ! " 

In his later years, it is reported that a Yorkshire country- 
man once talked with him and tried to tell him how much 
he had enjoyed his works. Mr. Ruskin's reply was: "I 
don't care whether you enjoyed them ; did they do you any 
good?" 

It is this unwavering perception of the beauty of goodness 
that has made Ruskin one of the great ethical teachers of 
this age. The prayer of Plato, " May the gods make me 
beautiful within," has been his; but not for himself alone. 
With all the fervor of the Hebrew prophet, he has cried to 
all men, — " Cleanse that which is within ! " 

Religion, with him, is not a creed, nor a system of observ- 
ances, but an animating, controlling spirit. "Be ye perfect, 
even as your Father in Heaven is perfect," he verily 
believes should not be banished from thought as unattain- 
able, but should become the lodestar of conduct as well 
as of aspiration. 

The entire life of John Ruskin has been one of consecra- 
tion. He was devoted to the service of God by his mother, 
but her hope of seeing him a clergyman was never realized ; 
yet no man in this century has more faithfully performed the 
office of bishop and pastor according to the ideal as pre- 
sented by him in " Kings' Treasuries." His ministry has 
been to those who have ears for the truth, and he has, 
indeed, been eyes to the blind. A chronological review of 
his works, accompanied by a study of his life, discovers a 
single-hearted devotion to the cause of truth and beauty, 
and unwearied activity in its- service. 

Reformers and philanthropists on the one hand, artists 
and art-critics on the other, have usually been regarded 
as two distinct types of men, with entirely different aims. 
It is for this reason that the publication of a series of 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

papers on Political Economy, under the title Unto This 
Last, in the same year (i860) in which the concluding 
volume of Modern Painters was published, was looked upon 
as an unaccountable phenomenon in authorship. And to 
this day, many, even of Mr. Ruskin's admirers, still consider 
the work of his later years as contradictory to that of the 
earlier period. 

In that fifth volume of Modern Painters, however, Ruskin, 
in reviewing the seventeen years of study during which his 
works on art and architecture had been written, says : "All 
true opinions are living and show their life by being capable 
of nourishment ; therefore of change. But their change is 
that of a tree, not of a cloud." Ruskin's criticisms of art 
had always been grounded on moral principles. He had 
tested all the work of man by its concurrence with the 
perfectness and beauty of the work of God, — so that "as 
the work changed like a tree, it was also rooted like 
a tree." 

In nature, Ruskin saw beauty ; in human society, he 
found deformity. Therefore it was natural that he should 
turn from a criticism of art to a criticism of life. It is 
because "he sees life steadily and sees it whole," that his 
efforts have been directed to secure moral wholeness, or 
health. His burning desire has been to bring man's life, — 
personal, social, political, — into harmony with the laws of 
God as impressed upon his being ; for he believes that the 
chief end of man is to glorify God by expressing in his own 
life the true image of the divine nature. 

John Ruskin sees nothing in isolation. He does not 
think of the artist, the mechanic, the merchant, the states- 
man, as concerned with unrelated interests. In all these 
accidental occupations of mankind, he beholds man striving 
by their means to realize himself, to fulfill his God-appointed 
destiny. 



X INTRODUCTION. 

Virtue, not vice; justice, not indifference or cruelty; 
helpful service, not crushing competition, seem to him the 
stepping-stones to truth expressed in life. He does not 
believe that any form of government or any legal enactment 
can make men better: they must reform their own lives — 
then alone will they attain true freedom. Hence he builds 
no Utopias. Duties, not rights, are his watchword. So, 
although he is a conservative, he demands the most radical 
reform. 

In a letter to Emerson, Carlyle wrote : " No man in 
England has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, 
and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to 
have." 

It is because Ruskin's grasp of principles has been so 
firm and constant, his feelings so keen, and his speech so 
impetuous, that he has seemed to the world a harsh censor, 
when he has wished to be a helpful mentor. 

He does not reproach this age as being worse than others, 
but he judges all periods by the standards of clear honor, 
just dealing, sincerity of purpose. Artists of daily life he 
has sought above all things to develop. 

"He aimed," says Collingwood, "at the general introduc- 
tion of higher aims into ordinary life ; at giving true refine- 
ment to the lower classes ; true simplicity to the upper." 

This aim is thus forcibly expressed by himself in the 
concluding volume of Modern Painters: "All effort in 
social improvement is paralyzed, because no one has been 
bold or clear-sighted enough to put and press home this 
radical question: 'What is, indeed, the noblest tone and 
reach of life for men ; and -how can the possibility of it be 
extended to the greatest numbers ? ' It is answered, broadly 
and rashly, that wealth is good ; that knowledge is good ; 
that art is good ; that luxury is good. Whereas, none of 
them are good in the abstract, but good only if rightly 



INTRODUCTION. XI 

received. . . . This we know, shown clearly by the history 
of all time, that the arts and sciences, ministering to the 
pride of nations, have invariably hastened their ruin ; and 
this also, I firmly believe, that the same arts and sciences 
will tend as distinctly to exalt the strength and quicken the 
soul of every nation which employs them to increase the 
comfort of lowly life, and grace with happy intelligence the 
unambitious courses of honorable toil." 

However opinions may differ as to John Ruskin's theories 
in art and economics, it cannot be denied that he has been 
one of the great motive forces of this age. 



II. 

In the volume entitled " Praeterita, or Scenes from My 
Past Life," John Ruskin has taken the reader into his con- 
fidence, and has revealed not merely the main incidents in 
his seventy-five years of life, but the inner controlling forces 
that have shaped his character. To the thoughtful student 
of humanity these formative influences are of absorbing 
interest, and especially in the case of those whom the world 
recognizes as leaders. 

The quiet life of the London home into which John 
Ruskin was born, February 8, 1819, was calculated to 
develop the love of order and the sense of peace which he 
counts as a rich part of his inheritance from those early years. 

Not only did the affection of his parents center in this, 
their only child, but to the day of their deaths (which 
occurred after Ruskin was past middle life) both his father 
and his mother seem to have lived only to promote his 
welfare. 

The almost Puritanic strictness of his mother early devel- 
oped in the boy habits of obedience and self-control. 
"Being always summarily whipped," he says, "if I cried, 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon 
attained serene and secure methods of life and motion." 

Love of truth, which is the watchword throughout his 
writings, seems to have been inborn, and to have been 
fostered by the home atmosphere. An incident related of 
his mother's own childhood reveals much. She had, on 0112 
occasion, told her father a lie ; whereupon he s:mt his 
servant for a bundle of broom twigs with which to whip her. 
The impression left upon her character is evident from her 
words : "They did not hurt as much as one would have 
done, but I thought a great deal of it." 

The perfect truthfulness to which John Ruskin was 
accustomed, begot in him perfect faith, for as he says : 
" Nothing was ever promised me that was not given ; noth * 
ing ever threatened me that was not inflicted ; and nothing 
ever told me that was not true." It is his opinion that, 
" Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only by 
practice ; it is less a matter of will than of habit," and he. 
doubts if any occasion can be trivial, which permits th'4 
practice and formation of such a habit. 

In his babyhood, little was clone to amuse him ; and bein|?; 
left to his own resources chiefly, this naturally serious 
minded child early accustomed himself to studiously observ- 
ing whatever came under his eye, within doors and without. 
The pattern of the carpet and the wall-paper divided his 
attention with the counting of bricks in the neighboring 
houses ; and the most exciting event in his day was watch- 
ing the process of filling the water-cart from an iron post on 
the pavement edge. To the habit of fixed attention with 
both eyes and mind thus formed, Mr. Ruskin attributes a 
large part of his power of looking into the very heart of 
things in later life. 

In his fifth year, his daily horizon was expanded by 
removal to Heme Hill, four miles distant from the heart of 



INTRODUCTION. Xlll 

London. The new home had a garden and an orchard, 
which so far satisfied the nature-loving boy that to him it 
seemed an Eden, especially since the climate then allowed 
him to pass a great part of his time in it. Yet he observed 
a difference between this Paradise and that of our first 
parents, viz., that whereas, in Eden, but one tree was for- 
bidden, at Heme Hill all the fruit was denied him. He 
also lamented that he had " no companionable beasts " to 
cheer his solitude. 

In his boyhood, his mother was his only teacher. He 
read aloud with her every week-day morning from Pope's 
translation of Homer and the novels of Sir Walter Scott ; 
and, on Sundays, "Robinson Crusoe" and "Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress." He was also required to read regularly from the 
Bible, and to commit certain portions to memory. Of this 
habit he says : " My mother forced me by steady, patient, 
daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Eible by heart, as 
well as to read every syllable through aloud, hard names 
and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once every 
year. She read alternate verses with me, watching, at first, 
every intonation of my voice, and correcting the false ones, 
till she made me understand the verse, if within my reach. 
It might be beyond me altogether, — that she did not care 
about ; but she made sure that as soon as I got hold of it 
all, I should get hold of it by the right end. If a name was 
hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation ; if a chapter 
was tiresome, the better the lesson in patience ; if a chap- 
ter was loathsome, the better lesson in faith that there was 
'some use in its being so outspoken." 

The effect of this training was to " make every word of 
the scriptures familiar to my ear in habitual music, — yet in 
that familiarity, reverenced as transcending all thought and 
ordaining all conduct." And of all the knowledge which he 
afterwards acquired, Ruskin counts this intimate acquaint- 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

ance with the Bible as, on the whole, the essential part of his 
education. 

Strict though she was, John Ruskin's mother seems never 
to have required him to commit more than he could easily 
learn by twelve o'clock, if he studied diligently. For the 
afternoon, he was free to employ himself as he chose. 

The father of John Ruskin must have been an ideal mer- 
chant, not only in the intelligence and exactitude of his busi- 
ness habits, which made him prosperous, and in the integrity 
which led his son to have written on the granite slab over 
his grave, — " He was an entirely honest merchant " ; — but 
because he was never enslaved by his business. He was a 
man of cultivated tastes, both in art and literature. 

It was his habit to go home to dinner at half-past four ; 
and he spent the evening in reading aloud, while the mother 
knitted, and the boy sat in a recess in the drawing-room, a 
cup of milk and a slice of bread and butter before him on a 
small table, listening or not, as he chose. He seems to 
have found these readings interesting, for the authors whose 
acquaintance he made in that way, Scott, Shakespeare, 
Byron, and Cervantes, always continued to be favorites. 

Salutary as were these influences, Ruskin does not fail to 
recognize the narrowing tendency of his isolated childhood. 
He says : " My verdict on the general tenor of my educa- 
tion at this time must be that it was at once too formal and 
too luxurious; leaving my character cramped indeed, but 
not disciplined ; and only by protection innocent, instead of 
by practice virtuous." 

While his intellectual taste was thus being cultivated, and 
the principles established which were to become the guiding 
motives of all his later work, his aesthetic and moral nature 
was yearly becoming enriched by leisurely travel through 
the picturesque scenes of England, or of Scotland, the 
native home of his parents. 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

These summer tours, which his father took for orders, 
were made a delightful two-months holiday to mother and 
son as well. In a post-chaise, with a seat specially arranged 
for the boy John, they traveled forty or fifty miles a day. 
Whenever they passed near a castle or a country gentle- 
man's house, they would visit it to inspect its collection of 
pictures, or to glean some interesting facts concerning its 
history. These glimpses of the life of the great seem 
never to have excited in them any envy or revolt. Instead, 
they were grateful for life in a country so rich in inherited 
treasures and traditions. Thus Ruskin early saw, as he tells 
us, nearly all the noblemen's houses in England " in reverent 
and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, — perceiving, 
as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that 
it was probably much happier to live in a small house 
and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to 
live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished 
at ; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick 
Square 1 more pleasantly habitable to pull Warwick Castle 
down." 

Ruskin's susceptibility to the influences of nature was 
derived from his father. It is a pleasant picture, — that of 
the father and son, hand in hand, strolling along some by- 
path or hedgerow, " looking into the beauty of a flower, or 
gazing in rapture at some lovely nook where Nature had 
lavished her richest gifts of fern and foliage," for the elder 
Ruskin never failed to call the boy's attention to the 
beauties of any attractive scene. The result is, that, as he 
says, "I possess the gift of taking pleasure in landscape in 
a greater degree than most men." 

The discriminating taste in art, for which Ruskin has been 
remarkable, finds its roots likewise in his father's intelligent 
love of true art. In his infallible judgment the son trusts 

1 His early childhood's home was in Brunswick Square, London. 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

implicitly. By never allowing the boy to look at a bad 
picture after he was old enough to judge, and by critical 
examination of the pictures -in the great houses they visited, 
his father formed in him a pure artistic taste. 

Very early also he became interested in stones and 
minerals. In later life, his collection of minerals was very 
extensive, and he made many and wide observations of 
geological strata in different countries, so that he thinks 
he might easily have distinguished himself as a geologist. 
Many of his writings have for their themes the sermons 
which he found in stones and running brooks, in leaves and 
flowers. 

We must not overlook the early practice in composition 
which made the written expression of thought natural to him. 
Close observation of details and accuracy in reporting what 
he saw, were developed by the habit of spending the even- 
ings on their travels in recording in a journal the observa- 
tions and experiences of the day. When at home, he 
accustomed himself to writing abstracts of books read, and 
to retelling stories with changed names and situations. 
Family birthdays were always festival occasions ; and, after 
he was old enough, he generally prepared as a delightful 
surprise for his father's birthday some original piece of 
composition which he often illustrated with his own drawings. 

In his case, it is easy to trace the influences which tended 
to make the child the father of the man. By all his early 
training and experiences he was being fitted for his calling 
as a teacher of ethics in art and life. These tendencies may 
almost be said to have been crystallized by a gift made 
to him on his fourteenth birthday by one of his father's 
partners. This gift was a copy of Rogers's " Italy," a work 
illustrated by the artist Turner. 

So enraptured was he by these pictures of Italian scenery 
that his mother proposed that their summer's tour should b- 



INTRODUCTION. XVU 

made in those scenes, instead of following their usual route. 
It was a decision trembling with destiny. The mother could 
not have foreseen that the "Continental Journey" so joyful 
to them all was to make of her son a writer of books, instead 
of a preacher of pulpit sermons. 

Love of mountains has always been a passion with 
Ruskin. To the artist who painted his portrait at the age 
of three, he had said, when asked what he would like for 
a background, — "Blue hills." In " Praeterita," he has 
described his first sight of the Alps, which was to him a 
consecration : " It was drawing towards sunset when we got 
up to some sort of garden promenade — high above the 
Rhine, so as to command the open country. At which open 
country of low undulations far into blue, — suddenly — 
.behold — beyond." "There was no thought in any of us 
of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on 
the horizon sky ; and already tinged with rose by the sink- 
ing sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or 
dreamed — the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been 
more beautiful to us ; not more awful, round heaven, the 
walls of sacred death." 

" It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a 
more blessed entrance into life for a child of such a tempera- 
ment as mine. I went down that evening with my destiny 
fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful. To that 
terrace, and the shore of the Lake of Geneva, my heart and 
faith return to this day, in every impulse that is yet nobly alive 
in them, and every thought that has in it help or peace." 

In 1836, at the age of seventeen, Ruskin entered Christ 
Church College at the University of Oxford. The associa- 
tions of the place impressed his sensitive nature, and the 
years spent there were fruitful in friendships, if not especially 
influential in developing his abilities. His desire to gratify 
his parents' ambitious hopes impelled him to compete 



XV111 INTRODUCTION. 

successfully for the Newdigate Prize Poem. But for college 
honors, which must be won by memory-cramming and com- 
petitive examinations, he had no ambition ; and when, in his 
third year at Oxford, a hemorrhage of the lungs led his 
physicians to recommend a winter in Italy, he hailed the 
permission to leave off his scholastic studies as a happy 
reprieve, saying that the delight of resuming his sketching 
gave a healthy stimulus to all the faculties which had been 
latently progressive in him. 

Oxford afterwards honored herself by conferring upon him 
degrees in acknowledgment of his invaluable services to 
literature and art ; and, when the Slade Art Professorship 
was established (1869), Mr. Ruskin willingly accepted its 
duties that he might arouse in the youth of the higher 
classes an intelligent interest in art. The lectures that he. 
delivered while holding this professorship are among the 
most instructive and inspiring of his writings. 

On his twenty-first birthday, his father made him a present 
of a drawing by Turner, and also settled upon him about 
$1000 a year for spending-money, $350 of which the young 
man immediately spent for one of Turner's water-colors. 

The real work of Ruskin's life may be said to have begun 
when, at the age of twenty-four, he published a defense of 
Turner's methods in painting, which had been bitterly 
attacked by the critics. Whatever might be thought. of 
Turner, the English reading public detected in this volume, 
entitled "Modern Painters," and signed "By an Oxford 
Graduate," the voice of a new master of English prose. 

All the works that issued from his pen until he was forty 
years old combined to give him the reputation of being an 
Apostle of the Beautiful ; but Ruskin never had believed in 
the doctrine of " Art for Art's sake " : he had always held 
that its reason for being was to give expression to the 
diviner perceptions and feelings in man, and thereby to 



INTRODUCTION. XIX 

purify and elevate all life. "The main business of art," he 
says, "is its service in the actual uses of daily life." "The 
giving brightness to pictures, is much, but the giving bright- 
ness to life, more." 

Since i860, the work of Mr. Ruskin, which has been 
mainly exerted to bring brightness and beauty into the lives 
of men and women of all classes, may be considered under 
two aspects : first, as a writer and lecturer ; second, as a 
practical philanthropist. 

Feeling that the mechanical grind of machine-labor had 
taken from the common workman all the joy in work ; that 
the cruel oppression of Competition had led many men to 
find their happiness at the expense of others' loss, Mr. 
Ruskin lifted up his voice in protest against what he con- 
siders the false notions of social economics which are at the 
root of much of the misery in the modern world. He says 
that he could not go on painting or doing anything else that 
he liked because he was made wretched by the knowledge of 
the undeserved suffering all about him. "Therefore," he 
says, "I will endure it no longer quietly; but, henceforward, 
with any few or many who will help me, I will do my poor 
best to abate this misery." 

To that end, he has lectured to Oxford students and to 
the citizens of many towns in England ; he has written 
numerous letters to workingmen, and published articles on 
questions of political economy ; he has tried to teach young 
and old of all ranks through papers on art and science and 
nature ; the burden of his message being always : Let 
the love of the true, the beautiful, and the good mould your 
individual and your national life, so that purity and whole- 
some living may be possible to all. 

By teaching its classes and in other ways, the Working- 
men's College and the University Extension Courses have 
received Mr. Ruskin's active personal support. 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

As of Chaucer's parson, so it may be justly said of Mr. 
Ruskin that — 

" Cristes lore and his apostles twelve 
He taught, but first he followed it himselve." 

Of the large fortune of nearly $800,000 left him by his 
father, he has kept less than one-twelfth for himself, having 
used the rest in establishing museums, art-schools and 
libraries ; in erecting comfortable dwelling-houses for the 
poor ; in aiding needy young men and women to get an 
education, etc. He has not simply been the almoner, 
entrusting the distribution of his gifts to others, but has 
himself, in most cases, attended personally to the carrying 
out of his benevolent schemes. He gave altogether $70,000 
to establish St. George's Guild near Sheffield, where the 
effort was made to put into practical operation a community 
of industries conducted on the principle of cooperation 
instead of competition. Those who joined this Guild were 
asked to subscribe to the following statement of faith and 
practice : 

1. I trust in the living God, Father Almighty, Maker of 
Heaven and Earth, and of all things and creatures, visible 
and invisible. I trust in the kindness of His law and the 
goodness of His work. And I will strive to love Him and 
to keep His law, and to see His work while I live. 

2. I trust in the nobleness of human nature — in the 
majesty of its faculties, the fullness of its mercy, and the joy 
of its love. And I will strive to love my neighbor as myself, 
and even when I cannot, I will act as if I did. 

3. I will labor with such strength and opportunity as 
God gives me, for my own daily bread ; and all that my 
hand finds to do, I will do it with my might. 

4. I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, any human 
being for my gain or pleasure ; nor hurt, nor cause to be 



INTRODUCTION. XXI 

hurt, any human being for my gain or pleasure ; nor rob, 
nor cause to be robbed, any human being for my gain or 
pleasure. 

5. I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, 
nor destroy any beautiful thing ; but will strive to save and 
to comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural 
beauty upon the earth. 

6. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into 
higher powers of duty and happiness ; not in rivalship or 
contention with others, but for the help, delight, and honor 
of others, and for the joy and peace of my own life. 

7. I will obey all the laws of my country faithfully ; and 
the order of its monarch, so far as such laws and commands 
are consistent with what I suppose to be the law of God ; 
and when they are not so, or seem in any wise to need 
change, I will oppose them loyally and deliberately — not 
with malicious, concealed, or disorderly violence. 

8. And with the same faithfulness, and under the limits of 
the same obedience, which I render to the laws of my 
country, and the commands of its rulers, I will obey the 
laws of the society called of St. George ... so long as I 
remain a companion called of St. George. 

The land which the Guild worked was to be brought 
under perfect cultivation ; the laborers were to be paid 
unchanging, sufficient wages ; and their children were to be 
educated in industrial schools that would develop their 
special powers ; the girls were to be taught domestic arts. 
Gentleness, courtesy, truth, and obedience were to be strictly 
inculcated. By hearing of brave and beautiful deeds, rever- 
ence was to be cultivated, and all were to be taught music 
as an expression of true feeling. 

Experimentally, the plan has not been a success, because 
it was undertaken by people who did not understand or 
sympathize fully with Mr. Ruskin's ideas. His efforts to 



XX11 INTRODUCTION. 

induce manufacturers to produce honest goods, and trades- 
men to offer for sale unadulterated articles were not without, 
effect, however, and the leaven of the principles of the 
Guild of St. George is still working. 

Mr. Ruskin is no cold speculative spinner of theories 
which are foreign to his own practice. The motto which he 
adopted for his crest — "To-day ! " — is the keynote of his 
entire life. Whenever he has felt that a word must be 
spoken to awaken the ignorant or the indifferent, he has 
said it. Wherever he has seen an opportunity for bettering 
conditions, he has, at once, done all in his power for their 
improvement. On one occasion, finding a crop of thistles 
growing as the result of a farmer's carelessness, he eradi- 
cated them with his own hands. While he was lecturing at 
Oxford, he said to the students : " Will none of you of your 
own strength and leisure do anything for the poor — drain a 
single cottage, repair a single village by-way ? Then, you 
yourselves will be more strong, and your hearts more light, 
than had your leisure been spent in costly games or more 
hurtful amusements." There was an active response to this 
noble appeal, resulting in the mending of a neglected piece 
of road. His own sincerity and earnestness were demon- 
strated by his taking lessons in stone-breaking himself. 
Indeed, he has consistently upheld the dignity of all honest 
labor. He tells us that the happiest bit of manual labor 
that he ever did was for his mother once when they were 
traveling in Switzerland. She had complained that the 
stone staircase in the little inn where they were stopping 
was unbearably dirty. Nobody belonging to the house 
seeming to think it possible to wash it, Ruskin says he 
brought the necessary buckets of water from the yard, 
"poured them into a beautiful image of Versailles water- 
works " down the fifteen or twenty steps, and, with the 
strongest broom he could find, cleaned every step into its 



INTRODUCTION. XX111 

corner. " It was quite lovely work to dash the water and 
drive the mud from each with accumulating splash down to 
the next one." 

No wonder that he held that " A true lady should be a 
princess, a washerwoman, — yes, a washerwoman ! To see 
that all is fair and clean, to wash with water, to cleanse and 
purify wherever she goes, to set disordered things in orderly 
array." 

Ruskin has said that the creation of the world for him 
dates from a day in his fifth year when his nurse took him 
to Friar's Crag on Derwentwater. "The intense joy mingled 
with awe that I had in looking through the mossy roots over 
the crag into the dark lake has associated itself more or less 
with all twining roots of trees ever since." 

In his sixtieth year, suffering from illness and exhaustion 
induced by excessive labors and anxiety, he " wearied for 
the heights that look down upon the dale," and felt that if 
he could only lie down there, he should get well again. He 
was glad, therefore, to avail himself of an opportunity that 
offered to purchase a house and land overlooking Lake 
Coniston, near the spot so dear in his memory. 

Brantwood, as he calls the place, has ever since been to 
him a refuge of peace and joy. For although he still retains 
the old home at Heme Hill, yet he loves to work and rest 
with congenial friends in this beautiful retreat among the 
hills and lakes. 

Those who have been associated with him the longest 
and most intimately, love him ardently. The feeling which 
throbs in every page he has written expresses itself in 
thoughtful kindliness to all who come within the charmed 
circle of his friendship. He is a perfect host, a considerate 
neighbor, a lover of children and of animals, — a teacher 
whose own life has been a consistent expression of the ideal 
knighthood of which he has been the fearless advocate. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 



III. 



Mr. Ruskin has always recognized and accepted his own 
limitations. While he has used the pencil and the brush 
with great delicacy and skill, in the illustration of his works, 
he early discovered that nature had not gifted him with the 
creative faculty necessary to the successful artist. In his 
youth, he wrote poems which the affectionate admiration of 
his friends afterwards induced him to publish, but he him- 
self knew that he was lacking in the constructive imagina- 
tion essential to the production of great poems, so he never 
wrote poetry after he was thirty years of age. But those 
who have been thrilled by the melody and the picturing 
power of his rhythmical imaginative prose find in this noth- 
ing to regret. For, under his touch, English prose has 
revealed a capability of sensuous, lyrical expression before 
unknown. 

A recent writer has said : " Poetry is the expression, in 
beautiful form and melodious language, of the best thoughts* 
and noblest emotions, which the spectacle of life awakens 
in the finest souls ; hence, it is clear that this may be 
effected by prose as truly as by verse, if only the language 
be rhythmical and beautiful." 

Words are to Ruskin not merely mechanical devices for 
convenience in the communication of ideas. The sense of 
Tightness, which dominates all his thinking, leads him to be 
perfectly accurate and precise in the use of words ; the 
reverence with which he views all of life gives to his 
language an impassioned, persuasive character ; the pene- 
trating vision, which reveals to him everywhere in nature 
the presence of the beautiful, imparts to his prose a rich 
ornamentation and a chaste imagery. 

Ruskin's style had really been formed by his childhood's 
habit of daily repetition of the poetic language of the 



INTRODUCTION. XXV 

The fervor of feeling, the sublime simplicity of diction, the 
glow of imaginative vision characteristic of the Hebrew 
poets and prophets had become his own mode of thinking, 
and, consequently, of expression. So much was said of the 
beauty of his style in his earlier works that he was seriously 
disturbed, and complained that, "People do not think at all 
about what I am saying, but only about how I say it." 

It is acknowledged by a critic not altogether friendly that, 
if we compare anything which is familiar to us with Ruskin's 
description of it, we shall find that, not only are his words 
pleasing in their appeal to the ear and the eye, but also that 
he has given an exhaustive enumeration of attributes, and 
the most discriminating selection of the features that give 
distinctive essence to the thing described. 

Ruskin himself says that he left no passage until he had 
put into it as much as it could be made to carry, and that he 
had chosen the words with the utmost precision and tune he 
could give them. Much as he loves words for their Tight- 
ness and their beauty, in his dealing with every question, he 
avoids, as far as possible, technical terms. Scholastic 
verbal quiddities are hateful to him because he goes to the 
heart of life in the endeavor to penetrate its secret. 

Ruskin's writings everywhere give evidence that "The 
style is the man.'' The same unity and harmony are in his 
language as in his view of art and life ; the same principles 
control his style as his thought. " All the virtues of 
language," he says, "are in their roots, moral ; it becomes 
accurate if the speaker desires to be true ; clear, if he 
speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible ; power- 
ful, if he has earnestness ; pleasant, if he has sense of 
rhythm and order." 

Writing to young students, Mr. Ruskin admonished them 
to fix in their minds as the guiding principle of all right 
i bor and the source of all healthful energy the idea that 



XXVI INTRODUCTION. 

their art should be in praise of something that they loved. 
It might be the praise of a shell or a stone ; it might be the 
praise of a hero ; it might be the praise of God ; but it 
must be the expression of true delight in some real thing. 
This is the secret of the moving quality, the impressiveness 
of Ruskin's writings. He loved nature as the expression of 
the loving thought of God. He studied plants and clouds 
and mountains, not as an artist, to paint pictures ; not as a 
scientist, to class and analyze them ; but to discover their 
aspects, to read in them the revelation of God to man. 
Like Wordsworth, he had felt, — 

" A sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things ; all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

It is because of this consciousness of the Indwelling God 
that Ruskin has been the interpreter of the mystical mean- 
ings in the various voices of nature. That he speaks to the 
common heart of man is shown by the fact that "his works 
have found their way among all classes." 

Ruskin is unsurpassed as a painter with words ; but he is 
more than a word-painter : his power to touch imagination 
with emotion, to stir the deeper feelings, and to rouse the 
whole moral nature will continue to make his a life-giving 
influence over generations to-come. 



A List of the Collected Works of Mr. Ruskin. 



The Poetry of Architecture. Papers Contributed to the 

Architectural Magazine. 183 7-1 839. 
The King of the Golden River. A Mythical Story for the 

Young. 1 841. 
Modern Painters. 5 vols. 1 843-1 860. 
Seven Lamps of Architecture. 1849. 
Pre-Raphaelitism. 1 85 1. 
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. (On the 

Duty of Pastors.) 1S51. 
Stones of Venice. 3 vols. 185 1-1853. 
Lectures on Architecture. 1853. 
Elements of Drawing. (Letters to Beginners.) 1857. 
The Political Economy of Art. 1857. 
Two Paths on Art. Its Application to Decoration and Manu- 
facture. 1859. 
Poems. Collected in 1859. 

Unto This Last. Lectures on Political Economy, i860. 
Munera Pulveris. On the Elements of Political Economy. 

1863. 
Sesame and Lilies. 1865. 
Ethics of the Dust. Lectures to Little Housewives on the 

Elements of Crystallization. 1865. 
Crown of Wild Olive. Three Lectures on Work, Traffic, and 

War. 1866. 
Time and Tide. Letters to a Workingman on the Laws of 

Work. 1867. 
The Queen of the Air. A Study of the Greek Myths of 

Cloud and Storm. 1869. 



XXV111 LIST OF COLLECTED WORKS. 

Lectures on Art. Delivered before the University of Oxford. 
1870. 

Aratra Pentelici. Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture 
Delivered at Oxford. 1870. 

Fors Clavigera. Letters to Workingm en. 1871-1878. 

Ariadne Florentina. Lectures on Wood and Metal Engrav- 
ing. 1872. 

Love's Meinie. A Study of Birds. 1873. 

The Art of England. (Oxford Lectures.) 1874. 

Proserpina. Studies of Wayside Flowers. 1874. 

Deucalion. Studies on the Lapse of Waves and the Life of 
Stones. 1876. 

St. Mark's Rest. The History of Venice. 1877. 

Val d' Arno. Oxford Lectures on Tuscan Art. 1877. 

The Laws of Fesole. A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary 
Principles of Drawing and Painting, Arranged for the Use of 
Schools. 1877. 

Mornings in Florence. Simple Studies on Christian Art. 

1877. 
Arrows of the Chace. (Collected Letters.) 1880. 
Pleasures of England. (Oxford Lectures.) 1885. 
Our Fathers Have Told Us. Sketches of the History of 

Christendom for Boys and Girls who have been held at its 

Fonts. 1885. 
Miscellanea. A Collection of Letters and Papers not included 

in his other published works. 1894. 
Hortus Inclusus. 

Praeterita. An Autobiography. 1887. 
Stones of Verona, and Other Lectures. 1894. 
A Joy Forever, and its Price in the Market. 1894. 



Bibliographical References. 



Aside from Mr. RuskhVs self-revelations in Praeterita, Fors 
Clavigera, etc., the best and most reliable account of him as a 
Man and a writer is — 

Life of John Ruskin, by W. G. Collingwood. 

Other valuable studies of his life and writings are found in the 
following named works : — 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning, by Mrs. 

Anne Thackeray Ritchie. 
Poets and Problems, by G. W. Cooke. 
Lessons from my Masters, by Peter Bayne. 
John Ruskin, His Life and Teaching, by J. R. Mather. 
Modern Leaders, by Justin McCarthy. 
Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, by Shepard. 
Out of the Past, by Godwin. 
The Work of John Ruskin, by Chas. Waldstein. 
The Victorian Age of English Literature, by Mrs. 

Oliphant. 
Famous Authors of the Nineteenth Century, by S. K. 

Bolton. 



QUOTATIONS FROM OTHER AUTHORS. 



Milton, Lycidas, 24; Paradise Lost, 

70. 
Shakespeare, 73, 306, 312. 
Scott, 101. 

Wordsworth, 84, 85, 90. 
De Quincey, 92, 93. 
Pope, 164, 312; translation from 

Homer, 315. 
Tennyson, 102, 103. 
Carlyle, 222. 

Freeman, the historian, 211. 
Richard Owen, 342. 



Froissart, 230-234. 

Homer, 298, 313, 322. 

Pindar, 296, 328. 

Euripides, 308. 

Virgil, 286. 

Horace, 295, 328. 

Ormerod, 314. 

Dante, 32, 54, 317. 

Coventry Patmore, 80. 

Dante Rossetti, 76, yy. 

John Stuart Mill, 187, 193, 194. 

Proverbs from the Italian, S3. 



INDEX TO SCRIPTURAL ALLUSIONS. 



Genesis, xi. 3, p. 395. 

Exodus, ii. 5, 10, p. (106); xv. 23, 

p. (16S); xix. 16, p. (432). 
Job, xxxviii. 31, p. 305. 
Judges, xiv. 5-14, p. (270). 
Proverbs, i. 26, 27, p. 376 ; x. 2, p. 

148; xxii. 2, 16, 22, 23, p. 149; 

xxix. 13, p. 149. 
Song oj Solomon, ii. 11-13, p. 237, 

(271); ii. 15, p. 103, (107). 
Isaiah, xi. 1, p. 318; xxxv. 1, p. 

69. 
Daniel, iii. 1, p. (168). 
Matthew, ii. I— II, p. (271); iv. 18- 

22, p. 24, (61); xvi. iS, 19, p. ,(61); 

xx. 1-14, p. 1 10 ; xxii. 3, 8, 9, p. 

(6t); xxvi. 14-16, p. (270). 



Luke, v. 27, p. (270); xvi. 20, p 

(63); xxii. 39-44. P- (429); xxiii 

18, 19, p. 151. 
John, iv. p. (271); viii. 10, 1 1, p 

23; xi. 49, 50, p. (62); xx. 20 

p. (107). 
Acts, ii. 2, p. (430); viii. p. (167) 

xi. 26, p. 319, (429); xvii. 23, p 

43 2 - 
Romans, vi. 8, p. 53, (64). 
Hebrews, xi. 7, p. 22. 

1 Corinthians, xv. 56, p. 148. 
/ Thessalonians, v. 19, p. 326. 

2 Peter, iii. 5-7, p. 22. 
Revelations, xiv. 15, p. 310. 



The intellect becomes noble and ignoble according to the food w« 
give it, and the kind of subjects with which it is conversant. — Stones of 
Vejiice. 

In the cloud of the human soul there is a fire stronger than the 
lightning, and a grace more precious than the rain ; and though of the 
good and evil it shall one day be said alike, that the place that knew 
them knows them no more, there is an infinite separation between those 
whose brief presence had been there a blessing, like the mist of Eden 
that went up from the earth to water the garden, and those whose place 
knew them only as a drifting and changeful shade, of whom the 
heavenly sentence is, that they are " wells without water; clouds that 
are carried with a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved 
for ever." — Mystery of Life. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

Ruskin certainly has a right to demand that those who 
read his writings shall obey the rule which he says should 
govern all reading : "Be sure that you go to an author to 
find out his meaning, not to find yours. Judge it after- 
wards, if you think yourself qualified to do so ; but ascertain 
it first." 

He has himself said, in a preface to these lectures, that 
their entire gist is to be found in the concluding paragraphs 
of the third lecture, "The Mystery of Life and its Arts." 
Therein we find an emphatic statement of his view of what 
constitutes right living. 

Instead of thinking what we are to get, he would have us 
think what we ought to do to make this world a good place 
for all God's children to live their lives in. 

" Those of us who mean to fulfill our duty ought, first," 
he says, "to live on as little as we can ; and, secondly, to 
do all the wholesome work we can, and to spend all we can 
spare in doing all the sure good we can." 

As is his custom, Ruskin would make the scriptural teach- 
ing a rule of practice, as well as of faith. To every man, 
whatever his station in life, who is doing nothing for the 
good of the world, he would say : " If any man will not 
work, neither should he eat." 

Helpful action in cooperation with others should be 
made the rule of life. For this, immediate opportunity 



4 SESAME AND LILIES. 

may always be found in mending evil material conditions. 
Every one should learn to do some useful thing thoroughly. 
When we educate our youths to "make it the effort of 
their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, 
lovely in word and deed," we shall have put into their hands 
the keys of the kingdom of heaven which is within us. 



" Sesame and Lilies " deals primarily with motives ; in 
these we shall find the sesame, the talisman, by which we 
may open all doors of feeling and understanding ; these 
hold the keys of Life, or — it may be — of Death. Mr. 
Ruskin's poetic nature appears in his love of symbolic 
names. The "Kings' Treasuries" of which he writes, are 
those which contain the precious thoughts of kingly minds 
in all ages — the great, true books of the world. 

What to read, and how to read might be the title of this 
lecture. Because of "our daily enlarging means of educa- 
tion " the choice of books is becoming of vital importance, 
not only to the individual, but to the national health. 
In Mr. Ruskin's opinion, there is a fundamental error in 
the common idea of the purpose of education. Most people 
are seeking an education for their children in order that it 
may secure to them some worldly advantage ; whereas, they 
do not seem to realize that there may be an education which 
is in itself an advancement in that higher life which 
does not consist in the abundance of things which a man 
possesses. 

With keen penetration, Mr. Ruskin analyzes the popular 
idea of " advancement in life," and finds that it practically 
means becoming conspicuous ; i.e., being recognized as 
having attained to something respectable or honorable. In 
making money, not the having wealth, but what Bacon calls 
"the fame of riches" ; in acquiring a position of authority, 



INTRODUCTORY. 5 

not the consciousness of superior ability to discharge its 
duties, but to hear himself addressed as " Captain," or " My 
Lord," — this it is which stimulates ambitious effort. Love 
of praise he believes to be the powerful incentive to human 
action, especially in our day. We want to get into what the 
world calls "good society," that we may be seen in it. 

Although Mr. Ruskin may seem to set a low estimate 
upon the motives of men in general, yet he does not deny 
that the desire of being useful, of duty to fellow-men, does 
have a share in the motives of most. 

In associating with the true and the wise, we are most 
likely to be happy and useful. How are we to secure such 
association ? Few of us can be admitted to the higher 
circles of human intelligence among the living men and 
women of our own day ; but, while we vainly covet an 
audience with queens and princes, with men of science and 
great poets, we sometimes overlook the fact that the best 
thought of the princely minds of all ages is offered to us, 
and is waiting patiently for our listening ear. Hidden 
behind the covers of books we may find the best expression 
of the deepest thought of the wise. But there are books 
and books : it is essential to distinguish. 

The inherently bad books, it is needless to say, should 
never be opened ; but, if we would so use books as to 
advance ourselves in the true sense, we must follow Mr. 
Ruskin's suggestion: give some time to the "good books 
for the hour," which acquaint us with the life of our own 
age ; but give our chief attention to the masterpieces in 
literature, — the "good books for all time." These Books 
of the Kings are the treasuries whose gems may be won by 
all who learn the sesame, or magic pass-word. 

The remainder of the lecture is devoted chiefly to showing 
how such knowledge may be acquired ; for this noble society 
will open its doors only to those who make themselves 



6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

worthy. Worthiness is to be attained through love alone, and 
this love must be shown in two ways: First) by patient atten- 
tion and laborious study whereby we may enter understand- 
ing^ into their thoughts; second, by sharing their mighty pas- 
sion, through which we may rise to a knowledge of their hearts. 

A reader of many books, according to Mr. Ruskin, is not 
necessarily an educated person. The superficial study of 
several languages may even be attended by a kind of 
illiteracy, i.e., a lack of real understanding of the words 
of any language. On the other hand, the accurate knowl- 
edge which manifests itself in correct pronunciation, pre- 
cision in the use of words, and a clear understanding of the 
pedigree and history of his own language, marks a truly 
educated man. To acquire this knowledge entails severe 
study, but " the general gain to character in power and pre- 
cision will be quite incalculable." 

To illustrate his idea of the kind of study necessary for 
acquiring this exact knowledge, Mr. Ruskin examines closely 
a passage from Milton's " Lycidas." His analysis, or 
"word-by-word examination," not only makes the sense of 
this passage intelligible, but also shows just how he would 
have us get the author's meaning in reading any piece of 
literature ; by banishing from our thoughts, for the time, 
all preconceived notions of our own, and entering into the 
mind of the writer so as to see what he saw. 

To make our minds good ground for the growth of the 
seeds which these Kings of Thought have to sow, we must 
clear them of all weeds of prejudice, and root up and 
utterly destroy whatever evil may have begun to grow 
therein. By this means, since " moral judgments are based 
on intellectual," we shall be able to take the second step 
towards worthiness to be admitted to friendly companion- 
ship with the great. By habits of precise thinking, we enter 
into their minds ; but it is only by feeling truly that we can 



INTRODUCTORY. 7 

enter into their hearts. Sensitive sympathy with whatsoever 
is pure, just, and noble gives the talismanic sesame which 
opens the doors to the treasuries of living truth. 

As with the individual, so with the nation. " For as in 
nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar 
person, so in nothing is a gentle nation better to be dis- 
cerned from a mob, than in this, — that their feelings are 
constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of 
equal thought." 

By citing actual examples drawn from (then) recent 
occurrences, Ruskin shows how England falls short of real 
greatness, — that greatness which secures to every man, 
woman, and child healthful conditions for the development 
of sound bodies, intelligent minds, pure morals. 

His own justness in judging is made evident by his 
acknowledging that the public heart still beats true in 
response to an appeal to its higher feelings. " Instinctive, 
reckless virtue," however, cannot save a nation ; its pas- 
sions must be disciplined by reason, and controlled by love 
of justice and righteousness. 

That the " insanity of avarice " is so seriously affecting 
the mind of England as to cause a loss of hearty apprecia- 
tion of nature's beauties, of art, literature, and science, and 
a blunting of human sympathy, is proved by the evidence of 
striking facts. 

It is negative virtue revealed by callous indifference to 
remediable evils that leads Mr. Ruskin to accuse the public 
of "childish illiterateness." It is this want of right educa- 
tion which prevents our reading aright the lessons hidden 
in the Kings' Treasuries of Wisdom. The seeing eye and 
the understanding heart lead to the true advancement in 
life. " He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting 
softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose 
spirit is entering into Living Peace." 



8 SESAME AND LILIES. 

In the men who have this life resides the true kinghood. 
They are the men of power. The ideal state will be realized 
when these men, putting themselves under the guidance of 
the "Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought," and so 
becoming " magnanimous — mighty of heart, mighty of 
mind," — shall sit in the seats of kings and bring forth 
treasures of wisdom for their people. 

In public education, directed to make men thoughtful, 
merciful, and just, is the only talisman of public health and 
public safety. 



LECTURE I. — SESAME. 

OF KINGS' TREASURIES.i 

" You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound." 

Lucian : The Fisherman. 

i. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for 
the ambiguity of title under which the subject of this lecture 
has been announced : for indeed I am not going to talk of 
kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to 
contain wealth ; but of quite another order of royalty, and 
another material of riches, than those usually acknowledged. 
I had even intended to ask your attention for a little while 
on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend 
to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted 
most to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until 
we unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding 
paths. But — and as also I have heard it said, by men 
practiced in public address, that hearers are never so much 
fatigued as by the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives 

1 This lecture was given December 6, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, 
Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 9 

them no clue to his purposes, — I will take the slight mask 
off at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to you 
about the treasures hidden in books ; and about the way we 
find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, 
you will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; so wide that I shall 
make no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only 
to bring before you a few simple thoughts about reading, 
which press themselves upon me every day more deeply, as 
I watch the course of the public mind with respect to our 
daily enlarging means of education ; and the answeringly 
wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 
2. It happens that I have practically some connection 
with schools for different classes of youth ; and I receive 
many letters from parents respecting the education of their 
children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck 
by the precedence which the idea of a "position in life" 
takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more 
especially in the mothers' — minds. " The education befit- 
ting such and such a station in life'''' — this is the phrase, 
this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can 
make out, an education good in itself ; even the conception 
of abstract Tightness in training rarely seems reached by the 
writers. But, an education " which shall keep a good coat 
on my son's back; — which shall enable him to ring with 
confidence the visitors' bell at doubled-belled doors ; which 
shall result ultimately in establishment of a doubled-belled 
door to his own house ; — in a word, which shall lead to 
'advancement in life' ; — this we pray for on bent knees — 
and this is all we pray for." It never seems to occur to 
the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, 
is advancement in Life ; — that any other than that may 
perhaps be advancement in Death ; and that this essential 
education might be more easily got, or given, than they 
fancy, if they set about it in the right way ; while it is for 



10 SESAME AND LILIES. 

no price, and by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in 
the wrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective 
in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first 
— at least that which is confessed with the greatest frank- 
ness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful 
exertion — is this of "Advancement in life." May I ask 
you to consider with me what this idea practically includes, 
and what it should include. 

Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " 
means, becoming conspicuous in life ; — obtaining a position 
which shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or 
honorable. We do not understand by this advancement, in 
general, the mere making of money, but the being known to 
have made it ; not the accomplishment of any great aim, 
but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we 
mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That 
thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first 
infirmity of weak ones ; and, on the whole, the strongest 
impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest 
efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of 
praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 

4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I 
want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; 
especially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of 
vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of 
repose ; so closely does it touch the very springs of life 
that the wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and 
truly) as in its measure mortal; we call it " mortification," 
using the same expression jwhich we should apply to a 
gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although few 
of us may be physicians enough to recognize the various 
effect of this passion upon health and energy, I believe most 
honest men know, and would at once acknowledge, its lead- 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. I I 

ing power with them as a motive. The seaman does not 
commonly desire to be made captain only because he knows 
he can manage the ship better than any other sailor on 
board. He wants to be made captain that he may be called 
captain. The clergyman does not usually want to be made 
a bishop only because he believes no Other hand can, as 
firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He 
wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called 
11 My Lord." And a prince does not usually desire to 
enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, because he believes 
that no one else can as well serve the State, upon its 
throne ; but, briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as 
"Your Majesty," by as many lips as maybe brought to such 
utterance. 

5. This, then, being the main idea of "advancement in 
life," the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our 
station, particularly to that secondary result of such ad- 
vancement which we call "getting into good society." We 
want to get into good society, not that we may have it, but 
that we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness 
depends primarily on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what 
I fear you may think an impertinent question ? I never can 
go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my 
audience are either with me or against me : I do not much 
care which, in beginning ; but I must know where they are ; 
and I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think 
I am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am 
resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted 
as probable ; for whenever, in my writings on Political 
Economy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity — or 
what used to be called "virtue" — maybe calculated upon 
as a human motive of action, people always answer me, say- 
ing, " You must not calculate on that : that is not in human 



12 SESAME AND LILIES. 

nature : you must not assume anything to be common to 
men but acquisitiveness and jealousy ; no other feeling ever 
has influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters 
out of the way of business." I begin, accordingly, to-night 
low in the scale of motives ; but I must know if you think 
me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who 
admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive 
in men's minds in seeking advancement, and the honest 
desire of doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary 
one, to hold up their hands. {About a dozen of hands held 
u p — the audience, partly, not being sure the lecturer is serious, 
and, partly, shy of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious 
— I really do want to know what you think ; however, I 
can judge by putting the reverse question. Will those who 
think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise the 
second, motive, hold up their hands? {One hand reported 
to have been held up, behind the lecturer.). Very good ; I see 
you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too 
near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting 
farther question, I venture to assume that you will admit 
duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think 
that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some 
real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a 
secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You 
will grant that moderately honest men desire place and 
office, at least in some measure, for the sake of beneficent 
power ; and would wish to associate rather with sensible 
and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant 
persons, whether they are seen in the company of the 
sensible ones or not. And finally, without being troubled 
by repetition of any common truisms about the precious- 
ness of friends, and the influence of companions, you will 
admit, doubtless, that according to the sincerity of our 
desire that our friends may be true, and our companions 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 1 3 

wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness and discretion 
with which we choose both, will be the general chances of 
our happiness and usefulness. 

6. But, granting that we had both the will and the sense 
to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ! 
or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! 
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or 
necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We can- 
not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the 
higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, 
only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good 
fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the 
sound of his voice ; or put a question to a man of science, 
and be answered good-humoredly. We may intrude ten 
minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with 
words worse than silence, being deceptive ; or snatch, once 
or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in 
the path of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a 
Queen. And yet these momentary chances we covet ; and 
spend our years, and passions, and powers in pursuit of 
little more than these ; while, meantime, there is a society 
continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long 
as we like, whatever our rank or occupation ; — talk to us 
in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest 
their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous 
and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day 
long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to 
grant audience, but to gain it ! — in those plainly furnished 
and narrow anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make 
no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a 
word they would say, all day long ! 

7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, 
that the apathy with which we regard this company of the 



14 SESAME AND LILIES. 

noble, who are praying us to listen to them ; and the 
passion with which we pursue the company, probably of the 
ignoble, who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, 
are grounded in this, — that we can see the faces of the 
living men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings, with 
which we desire to become familiar. But it is not so. Sup- 
pose you never were to see their faces; — suppose you 
could be put behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or 
the prince's chamber, would you not be glad to listen to 
their words, though you were forbidden to advance beyond 
the screen? And when the screen is only a little less, 
folded in two instead of four, and you can be hidden behind 
the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and listen all 
day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, deter- 
mined, chosen addresses of the wisest of men ; — this station 
of audience, and honorable privy council, you despise ! 

8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 
people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate 
interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay ; that 
cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you 
about passing matters, much better in their writings than in 
their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does 
influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and epheme- 
ral writings to slow and enduring writings, — books, properly 
so called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the 
books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this 
distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely 
the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. 
It is a distinction of species. There are good books for 
the hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books for the 
hour, and bad ones for all time. I must define the two 
kinds before I go farther. 

9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak 
of the bad ones, — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. I 5 

some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, 
printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you 
need to know ; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's 
present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels ; 
good-humored and witty discussions of question ; lively or 
pathetic story-telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, 
by the real agents concerned in the events of passing 
history ; — all these books of the hour, multiplying among 
us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar 
possession of the present age ; we ought to be entirely 
thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we 
make no good use of them. But we make the worst possi- 
ble use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books : 
for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely 
letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter 
may be delightful, or necessary, to-day : whether worth 
keeping or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may 
be entirely proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not 
reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the 
long letter which gives you so pleasant an account of the 
inns, and roads, and weather last year at such a place, or 
which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real 
circumstances of such and" such events, however valuable 
for occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of 
the word, a "book" at all, nor, in the real sense, to be 
"read." A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a 
written thing ; and written, not with the view of mere com- 
munication, but of permanence. The book of talk is printed 
only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people 
at once; if he could, he would — the volume is mere multi- 
plication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in 
India ; if you could, you would ; you write instead : that is 
mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to 
multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to 



l6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he 
perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So 
far as he knows, no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, 
no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and 
melodiously if he may ; clearly, at all events. In the sum 
of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, 
manifest to him ; — this, the piece of true knowledge, or 
sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted 
him to seize. He would fain set it down forever ; engrave 
it on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the best of me ; 
for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, 
like another ; my life was as the vapor, and is not ; but this 
I saw and knew : this, if anything of mine, is worth your 
memory." That is his "writing"; it is, in his small 
human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is 
in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book." 

10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so written. 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, 
or at all in kindness ? or do you think there is never any 
honesty or benevolence in wise people ? None of us, I 
hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit 
of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, 
that bit is his book, or his piece of art. 1 It is mixed always 
with evil fragments — ill-done, redundant, affected work. 
But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true 
bits, and those are the book. 

ii. Now books of this kind have been written in all ages 
by their greatest men : — by great readers, great statesmen, 
and great thinkers. These are all at your choice ; and Life 
is short. You have heard as much before ; — yet have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its possibil- 
ities ? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot 

1 Note this sentence carefully, and compare the Queen of the Air, 
§ 1 06. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 1 7 

read that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain 
to-morrow ? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, 
or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and 
kings ; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy con- 
sciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle 
with the hungry and common crowd for entree here, and 
audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open 
to you, with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as 
its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and 
time ? Into that you may enter always ; in that you may 
take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, 
once entered into it, yon can never be outcast but by your 
own fault ; by your aristocracy of companionship there, 
your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and 
the motives with which you strive to take high place in the 
society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and 
sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take 
in this company of the Dead. 

12. "The place yon desire," and the place you fit your- 
self 'for, I must also say ; because, observe, this court of the 
past differs from all living aristocracy in this : — it is open 
to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of 
those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar 
person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent 
Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question, Do you 
deserve to enter ? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion 
of nobles ? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do 
you long for the conversation of the wise ? Learn to under- 
stand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms ? — no. 
If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The 
living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher 
explain his thought to you with considerate pain ; but here 
we neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise to the level of 



15 SESAME AND LILIES. 

our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share 
our feelings, if you would recognize our presence." 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that 
it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you 
are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They 
scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your 
love in these two following ways : 

I. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to 
enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 
not to find your own expressed by them. If the person 
who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in many 
respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good this is 
— that's exactly what I think ! " But the right feeling is, 
" How strange that is ! I never thought of that before, and 
yet I see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some 
day." But whether thus submissively or not, at least be 
sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to 
find yours. Judge it afterwards, if you think yourself quali- 
fied to do so ; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if 
the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his 
meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his whole meaning you 
will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he 
does not say what he means, and in strong words too ; but 
he cannot say it all ; and what is more strange, will not, 
but in a hidden way and in parables, in order that he may 
be sure you want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, 
nor analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men 
which makes them always hide their deeper thought. They 
do not give it to you by way of help, but of reward ; and 
will make themselves sure that you deserve it before they 
allow you to reach it. But it is the same with the physical 
type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no 



OF KINGS TREASURIES, 1 9 

reason why the electric forces of the earth should not carry- 
whatever there is of gold within it at once to the mountain 
tops, so that kings and people might know that all the gold 
they could get was there ; and without any trouble of dig- 
ging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, 
and coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not 
manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, 
nobody knows where : you may dig long and find none ; 
you must dig painfully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. 
When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 
" Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would ? 
Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in 
good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my 
breath good, and my temper?" And, keeping the figure 
a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thor- 
oughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the 
author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which 
you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And 
your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning ; your 
smelting-furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope 
to get at any good author's meaning without those tools 
and that fire ; often you will need sharpest, finest chiseling, 
and pitientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of 
the metal. 

15. And therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and 
authoritatively (I know I am right in this), you must get 
into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay letter 
by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition 
of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function 
of signs, that the study of books is called "literature," and 
that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, 
a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you 



20 SESAME AND LILIES. 

may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real 
fact ; — that you might read all the books in the British 
Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an 
utterly " illiterate," uneducated person ; but that if you read 
ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, 
with real accuracy, — you are forevermore in some measure 
an educated person. The entire difference between educa- 
tion and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual 
part of it) consists in this accuracy. A well-educated 
gentleman may not know many languages, — may not be 
able to speak any but his own, — may have read very few 
books. But whatever language he knows, he knows pre- 
cisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; 
above all, he is learned in the peerage of words ; knows the 
words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance, from 
words of modern canaille ; remembers all their ancestry, 
their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to 
which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the 
national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. 
But an uneducated person may know, by memory, many 
languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word 
of any, — not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever 
and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at 
most ports ; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any 
language to be known for an illiterate person : so also the 
accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at 
once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so con- 
clusively admitted by educated persons, that a false accent 
or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any 
civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of 
inferior standing forever. 

1 6. And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy 
insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. 
It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite a smile 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 21 

in the House of Commons ; but it is wrong that a false 
English meaning should not excite a frown there. Let the 
accent of words be watched ; and closely : let their mean- 
ing be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the 
work. A few words well chosen and distinguished, will do 
work that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, 
equivocally, in the function of another. Yes ; and words, 
if they are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes. 
There are masked words droning and skulking about us in 
Europe just now, — (there never were so many, owing to 
the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious 
"information," or rather deformation, everywhere, and to 
the teaching of catechisms and phrases at schools instead 
of human meanings) — there are masked words abroad, I 
say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, 
and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, 
fancying they mean this or that, or the other, of things 
dear to them : for such words wear chameleon cloaks — 
"groundlion" cloaks, of the color of the ground of any 
man's fancy : on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him 
with a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey 
so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poi- 
soners so deadly, as these masked words ; they are the 
unjust stewards of all men's ideas : whatever fancy or 
favorite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his 
favorite masked word to take care of for him ; the word at 
last comes to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot 
get at him but by its ministry. 

17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, 
there is a fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, 
almost whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek 
or Latin words for an idea when they want it to be awful , 
and Saxon or otherwise common words when they want it 
to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for 



22 SESAME AND LILIES. 

instance, would be produced on the minds of people who 
are in the habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they 
live by, for the Power of which that Word tells them, if we 
always either retained, or refused, the Greek form " biblos," 
or "biblion," as the right expression for "book" — instead 
of employing it only in the one instance in which we wish 
to give dignity to the idea, and translating it into English 
everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for many 
simple persons, if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 
19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translating 
it, and they had to read — " Many of them also which used 
curious arts, brought their bibles together, and burnt them 
before all men ; and they counted the price of them, and 
found it fifty thousand pieces of silver ! " Or if, on the 
other hand, we translated where we retain it, and always 
spoke of " The Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible," it 
might come into more heads than it does at present, that 
the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and 
by which they are now kept in store, 1 cannot be made a 
present of to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on 
any wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; 
but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us with 
contumely refused ; and sown in us daily, and by us, as 
instantly as may be, choked. 

18. So, again, consider what effect has been produced 
on the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous 
Latin form "damno," in translating the Greek KaraKpivw, 
when people charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the 
substitution of the temperate "condemn" for it, when they 
choose to keep it gentle^ and what notable sermons have 
been preached by illiterate clergymen on — " He that 
believeth not shall be damned " ; though they would shrink 
with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of his 

1 2 Peter, iii. 5-7. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 23 

house, by which he damned the world " ; or John viii. 10, n, 
" Woman, hath no man damned thee ? She saith, No man, 
Lord. Jesus answered her, Neither do I damn thee ; go 
and sin no more." And divisions in the mind of Europe, 
which have cost seas of blood and in the defense of which 
the noblest souls of men have been cast away in frantic 
desolation, countless as forest leaves — though, in the heart 
of them, founded on deeper causes — have nevertheless been 
rendered practicably possible, namely, by the European 
adoption of the Greek word for a public meeting, "ecclesia," 
to give peculiar respectability to such meetings, when held 
for religious purposes ; and other collateral equivocations, 
such as the vulgar English one of using the word "priest" 
as a contraction for " presbyter." 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the 
habit you must form. Nearly every word in your language 
has been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, 
German, French, Latin, or Greek (not to speak of eastern 
and primitive dialects). And many words have been all 
these ; — that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, 
French or German next, and English last : undergoing a 
certain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation ; 
but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars 
feel in employing them, even at this day. If you do not 
know the Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old — girl or 
boy — whoever you may be, if you think of reading seriously 
(which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at 
command), learn your Greek alphabet ; then get good 
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are 
in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max 
Miiller's lectures thoroughly, to begin with ; and, after that, 
never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. It is 
severe work ; but you will find it, even at first, interesting, 
and at last, endlessly amusing. And the general gain 



24 SESAME AND LILIES. 

to your character, in power, and precision, will be quite 
incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
Greek or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word has passed ; and 
those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 

20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with 
your permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, 
carefully ; and see what will come out of them. I will take 
a book perfectly known to you all. No English words are 
more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been read with less 
sincerity. I will take these few following lines of Lycidas : 

" Last came, and last did go, 
The pilot of the Galilean lake ; 
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain), 
He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake, 
' How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, 
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold ! 
Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 
Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else, the least 
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 
What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 25 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its 
words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. 
Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very 
types of it which Protestants usually refuse most pas- 
sionately ? His " mitred " locks ! Milton was no Bishop- 
lover ; how comes St. Peter to be "mitred?" "Two 
massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys 
claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged 
here by Milton only in a poetical license, for the sake of its 
picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden 
keys to help his effect ? Do not think it. Great men do 
not play stage tricks with doctrines of life and death : only 
little men do that. Milton means what he says ; and means 
it with his might too — is going to put the whole strength 
of his spirit presently into the saying of it. For though not 
a lover of false bishops, he 7c>as a lover of true ones ; and 
the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of 
true episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, " I will 
give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven " quite 
honestly. Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out 
of the book because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in 
order to understand Aim, we must understand that verse 
first ; it will not do to eye it askance, or whisper it under 
our breath, as if it were a weapon of an adverse sect. It is 
a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be kept in mind by 
all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason on 
it if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For 
clearly this marked insistence on the power of the true 
episcopate is to make us feel more weightily what is to be 
charged against the false claimants of episcopate ; or 
generally, against false claimants of power and rank in the 
body of the clergy ; they who, " for their bellies' sake, 
creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." 



26 SESAME AND LILIES. 

21. Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up 
his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three ; 
specially those three, and no more than those — "creep," 
and "intrude," and "climb"; no other words would or 
could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For 
they exhaustively comprehend the three classes, corre- 
spondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly 
seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who "creep" into 
the fold ; who do not care for office, nor name, but for 
secret influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, 
consenting to any servility of office or conduct, so only that 
they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the minds 
of men. Then those who "intrude" (thrust, that is) them- 
selves into the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, and 
stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self- 
assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common 
crowd. Lastly, those who " climb," who by labor and 
learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in 
the cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and 
authorities, and become "lords over the heritage," though 
not " ensamples to the flock." 

22. Now go on : — 

" Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
Blind mouths — " 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression ; a broken 
metaphor, one might think, careless and un scholarly. 

Not so : its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 
make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those 
two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries 
of right character, in the two great offices of the Church — . 
those of bishop and pastor. 

A " Bishop " means a " person who sees." 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 2*] 

A " Pastor " means a " person who feeds." 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is there- 
fore to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be 
fed, ■ — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have " blind 
mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
desiring power more than light. They want authority, not 
outlook. Whereas their real office it not to rule ; though it 
may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke ; it is the king's 
office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock ; to 
number it, sheep by sheep ; to be ready always to give full 
account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of 
the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of 
his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to 
do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any 
moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of every 
living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down 
in that back street, Bill and Nancy, knocking each other's 
teeth out ! — Does the bishop know all about it ? Has he 
his eye upon them ? Has he had his eye upon them ? Can 
he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit 
of beating Nancy about the head ? If he cannot, he is no 
bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple ; 
he is no bishop, — he has sought to be at the helm instead 
of the masthead ; he has no sight of things. " Nay," you 
say, " it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street." 
What ! the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is 
only those he should look after, while (go back to your 
Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops know- 
ing nothing about it) "daily devours apace, and nothing 
said " ? 



28 SESAME AND LILIES. 

"But that's not our idea of a bishop." 1 Perhaps not; 
but it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They may be 
right, or we may be ; but we must not think we are reading 
either one or the other by putting our meaning into their 
words. 

23. I go on. 

" But ; swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are 
not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls ; 
they have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, " They have no such thing as spiritual 
food ; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may 
think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin 
and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of 
" Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin word 
"breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word 
for "wind." The same word is used in writing, "The wind 
bloweth where it listeth "; and in writing, " So is every one 
that is born of the Spirit "; born of the breath, that is ; for 
it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have 
the true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." 
Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock 
may be filled ; God's breath, and man's. The breath of 
God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of 
heaven is to the flocks on the hills ; but man's breath — 
the word which he calls spiritual, — is disease and contagion 
to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it ; 
they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of 
its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false, 
religious teaching ; the first and last, and fatalest sign of it 

1 Compare the 13th Letter in Time and Tide. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 20, 

is that " puffing up." Your converted children, who teach 
their parents ; your converted convicts, who teach honest 
men ; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous 
stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awakening to the fact 
of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His 
peculiar people and messengers ; your sectarians of every 
species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high 
church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively 
in the right and others wrong ; and preeminently, in every 
sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking 
rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and 
wish instead of work : — these are the true fog children — 
clouds, these, without water ; bodies, these, of putrescent 
vapor and skin, without blood or flesh : blown bag-pipes 
for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and corrupting, — 
" Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power 
of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the 
difference between Milton and Dante in their interpretation 
of this power : for once, the latter is weaker in thought ; he 
supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven ; one is 
of gold, the other of silver : they are given by St. Peter to 
the sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to determine the 
meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the 
gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, 
the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, the key of the 
prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who 
" have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in 
themselves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to 
see and feed ; and, of all who do so it is said, " He that 
watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the reverse 
is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered him- 
self, and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of 



30 SESAME AND LILIES. 

sight, — shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that 
prison opens here, as well as hereafter : he who is to be 
bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That com- 
mand to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the 
image, "Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast 
him out," issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for 
every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for 
every falsehood enforced ; so that he is more strictly 
fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as he more 
and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage 
close upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts 
amain." 

25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and 
much more is yet to be found in them ; but we have done 
enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word 
examination of your author which is rightly called " read- 
ing " ; watching every accent and expression, and putting 
ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our 
own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be 
able assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus / 
thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this process you 
will gradually come to attach less weight to your own " Thus 
I thought " at other times. You will begin to perceive that 
what you thought was a matter of no serious importance ; — 
that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the 
clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon : — in 
fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot 
be said to have any "thoughts" at all ; that you have no 
materials for them, in any serious matters ; l — no right to 
"think," but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, 
most probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a 

1 Modern " Education " for the most part signifies giving people the 
faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to 
them. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 3 1 

singular person) you will have no legitimate right to an 
" opinion " on any business, except that instantly under 
your hand. What must of necessity be done, you can 
always find out, beyond question, how to do. Have you a 
house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to 
plough, a ditch to cleanse ? There need be no two opinions 
about these proceedings ; it is at your peril if you have not 
much more than an "opinion" on the way to manage such 
matters. And also, outside of your own business, there are 
one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one 
opinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, and 
are instantly to be flogged out of the way whenever dis- 
covered ; — that covetousness and love of quarreling are 
dangerous dispositions even in children, and deadly dis- 
positions in men and nations ; — that in the end, the God 
of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, 
and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones ; — on these 
general facts you are bound to have but one and that a 
very strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, 
governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
you can know nothing, — judge nothing ; that the best you 
can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is 
to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to under- 
stand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon 
as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughts 
even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent 
questions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and 
exhibit to you the grounds for ///decision, that is all they 
can generally do for you ! — and well for them and for us, 
if indeed they are able " to mix the music with our thoughts, 
and sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from 
whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first or 
wisest : he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it 
is easy to find out his full meaning ; but with the greater 



32 SESAME AND LILIES. 

men, you cannot fathom their meaning ; they do not even 
wholly measure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I 
had asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's 
opinion, instead of Milton's, on this matter of Church 
authority? — or for Dante's? Have any of you, at this 
instant, the least idea what either thought about it ? Have 
you ever balanced the scene with the bishops in Richard 
III. against the character of Cranmer? the description of 
St. Francis and St. Dominic against that of him who made 
Virgil wonder to gaze upon him, — " disteso, tanto vilmente, 
nell' eterno esilio"; or of him whom Dante stood beside, 
"come '1 frate che confessa lo perfido assassin?" 1 Shake- 
speare and Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I 
presume ! They were both in the midst of the main 
struggle between the temporal and spiritual powers. They 
had an opinion, we may guess. But where is it ? Bring it 
into court ! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into arti- 
cles, and send it up for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts ! 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
many a clay, to come at the real purposes and teaching of 
these great men ; but a very little honest study of them will 
enable you to perceive that what you took for your own 
"judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, help- 
less, entangled weed of castaway thought : nay, you will see 
that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough 
heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, 
partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind- 
sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the first thing you have 
to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to 
set fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash 
heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary work 
before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, 
" Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns." 

1 Inf. xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 33 

27. II. 1 — Having then faithfully listened to the great 
teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have 
yet this higher advance to make ; — you have to enter into 
their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so 
you must stay with them, that you may share at last their 
just and mighty Passion. Passion, or " sensation." I am 
not afraid of the word ; still less of the thing. You have 
heard many outcries against sensation lately ; but, I can tell 
you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The 
ennobling difference between one man and another, — 
between one animal and another, — is precisely in this, that 
one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps 
sensation might not be easily got for us ; if we were earth- 
worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, 
perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, 
being human creatures, it is good for us ; nay, we are only 
human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is 
precisely in proportion to our passion. 

28. You know I said of that great and pure society of 
the dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person to 
enter there." ^yhat do you think I meant by a "vulgar" 
person ? What do you yourselves mean by " vulgarity " ? 
You will find it a fruitful subject of thought ; but, briefly, 
the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. 
Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and 
undeveloped bluntness of body and mind ; but in true 
inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in 
extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit 
and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, 
and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead 
heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, 
that men become vulgar ; they are forever vulgar, precisely 
in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy, — of quick 

1 Compare H 13 above. 



34 SESAME AND LILIES. 

understanding, — of all that, in deep insistence on the com- 
mon, but most accurate term, may be called the "tact" or 
" touch-faculty " of body and soul ; that tact which the 
Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above 
all creatures; — fineness and fullness of sensation beyond 
reason ; — the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason 
can but determine what is true : — it is the God-given pas- 
sion of humanity which alone can recognize what God has 
made good. 

29. We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, 
not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to 
feel with them what is just. Now, to feel with them, we 
must be like them ; and none of us can become that without 
pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested 
knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so the 
true passion is disciplined and tested passion, — not the 
first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, 
the false, the treacherous ; if you yield to them they will 
lead you wildly and far in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, 
till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not 
that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but 
only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force 
and justice ; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry 
cause. There is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a 
juggler tossing golden balls, and this is base, if you will. 
But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensa- 
tion less, wifch which every human soul is called to watch 
the golden balls of heaven tossed through the night by the 
Hand that made them ? There is a mean curiosity, as of a 
child opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying into her 
master's business ; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in 
the front of danger, the source of the great river beyond the 
sand, — the place of the great continents beyond the sea ; 
■ — a nobler curiosity still, which questions of the source of 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 35 

the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent of 
Heaven, — things which "the angels desire to look into." 
So the anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the 
course and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you think 
the anxiety is less, or greater, with which you watch, or 
ought to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with the life 
of an agonized nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfish- 
ness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplore 
in England at this day ; — sensation which spends itself in 
bouquets and speeches ; in revelings and junketings ; in 
sham fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on 
and see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an 
effort or a tear. 

30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensa- 
tion, but in a word, I ought to have said "injustice" or 
"unrighteousness" of sensation. For as in nothing is a 
gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, 
so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) 
better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, — that 
their feelings are constant and just, results of due contem- 
plation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into 
anything; its feelings may be — usually are — on the whole, 
generous and right ; but it has no foundation for them, no 
hold of them ; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your 
pleasure ; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching 
an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it 
will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on ; — nothing 
so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. 
But a gentleman's or a gentle nation's, passions are just, 
measured and continuous. A great nation, for instance, 
does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of 
months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having 
done a single murder; and for a couple of years see its 
own children murder each other by their thousands or tens 



36 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of thousands a day, considering only what the effect is 
likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to 
determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither 
does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for 
stealing six walnuts ; and allow its bankrupts to steal their 
hundreds or thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich 
with poor men's savings, to close their doors " under cir- 
cumstances over which they have no control," with a "by 
your leave"; and large landed estates to be bought by 
men who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at 
the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the 
foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of 
"your money or your life," into that of "your money and 
your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives 
of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog 
fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the 
sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords ; 1 
and then debate, with driveling tears, and diabolical sym- 
pathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and musingly 
cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation 
having made up its mind that hanging is quite the whole- 
somest process for its homicides in general, can yet with 
mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homi- 
cides ; and does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched 
wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, 
or gray-haired clodpate Othello, "perplexed i' the extreme," 
at the very moment that it is sending a Minister of the 
Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is bayoneting 
young girls in their father's sight, and killing noble youths 
in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in 

1 See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because the 
course of matters since it was written has made it perhaps better worth 
attention. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 37 

spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven 
and its Powers, by pretending belief in a revelation which 
asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and 
declaring, at the same time, that it is actuated, and intends 
to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by 
no other love. 

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should 
talk about reading. We want some sharper discipline 
than that of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we 
cannot read. No reading is possible for a people with 
its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is 
intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible 
for the English public, at this moment, to understand any 
thoughtful writing, — so incapable of thought has it become 
in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as 
yet, little worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is not 
corruption of the inner nature ; we ring true still, when 
anything strikes home to us ; and though the idea that 
everything should " pay " has infected our every purpose so 
deeply, that even when we would play the good Samaritan, 
we never take out our twopence and give them to the host, 
without saying, " When I come again, thou shalt give me 
fourpence," there is a capacity of noble passion left in our 
hearts' core. We show it in our work, — in our war, — even 
in those unjust domestic affections which make us furious 
at a small private wrong, while we are polite to a boundless 
public one : we are still industrious to the last hour of the 
day, though we add the gambler's fury to the laborer's 
patience ; we are still brave to the death, though incapable 
of discerning true cause for battle ; and are still true in 
affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea- 
monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for 
a nation while this can be still said of it. As long as it 
holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor 



38 SESAME AND LILIES. 

(though a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), 
and for its business (though a base business), there is hope 
for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue 
cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob 
of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its 
passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one 
day, with scorpion whips. Above all, a nation cannot last 
as a money-making mob : it cannot with impunity, — it can- 
not with existence,- — go on despising literature, despising 
science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, 
and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these 
are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but a little 
longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause by clause. 

32. I. — I say first we have despised literature. What do 
we, as a nation, care about books ? How much do you 
think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, 
as compared with what we spend on our horses ? If a man 
spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad — a biblio- 
maniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though 
men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do 
not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, 
to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of 
the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and pri- 
vate, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its 
wine-cellars ? What position would its expenditure on 
literature take, as compared with its expenditure on lux- 
urious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for 
the body; now a good book contains such food inex- 
haustibly ; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of 
us ; yet how long most peojple would look at the best book 
before they would give the price of a large turbot for it ! 
though there have been men who have pinched their 
stomachs and bared their backs, to buy a book, whose 
libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 39 

most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to such 
trial, and more the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is 
all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or 
economy ; and if public libraries were half as costly as 
public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what brace- 
lets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes sus- 
pect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and 
sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness of literature is 
making even wise people forget that if a book is worth 
reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything 
which is not worth much ; nor is it serviceable, until it has 
been read, and reread, and loved, and loved again ; and 
marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in 
it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, 
or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. 
Bread of flour is good : but there is bread, sweet as honey, 
if we would eat it, in a good book ; and the family must be 
poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot, for such 
multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. We call 
ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough 
to thumb each other's books out of circulating libraries ! 

33. II. — I say we have despised science. "What ! " you 
exclaim, "are we not foremost in all discovery, 1 and is not 
the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions ? " Yes ; but do you suppose that is national work ? 
That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by private 
people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 
make our profit of science ; we snap up anything in the 
way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly 
enough ; but if the scientific man comes for a bone or a 
crust to us, that is another story. What have we publicly 

1 Since this was written, the answer has become definitely — No ; 
we have surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental 
nations, as being ourselves too poor to pay for ships. 



4<3 SESAME AND LILIES. 

done for science ? We are obliged to know what o'clock it 
is, for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for an 
observatory ; and we allow ourselves, in the person of our 
Parliament, to be annually tormented into doing something, 
in a slovenly way, for the British Museum ; sullenly appre- 
hending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to 
amuse our children. If anybody will pay for his own 
telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the 
discernment as if it were our own ; if one in ten thousand 
of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was 
indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, 
and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the gold is, 
and where the coals, we understand that there is some use 
in that ; and very properly knight him : but is the accident 
of his having found out how to employ himself usefully any 
credit to us ? (The negation of such discovery among his 
brother squires may perhaps be some rtfocredit to us, if we 
would consider of it.) But if you doubt these generalities, 
here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of 
our love of science. Two years ago there was a collection 
of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria ; the best 
in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfect- 
ness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole 
kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by 
that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market 
worth, among private buyers, would probably have been 
some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to 
the English nation for seven hundred : but we would not 
give seven hundred, and the whole series would have been 
in the Munich Museum at Jthis moment, if Professor Owen 1 

1 I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission : which of 
course he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it ; but 
I consider it so important that the public should be aware of the fact 
that I do what seems to be right though rude. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 41 

had not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting 
of the British public in person of its representatives, got 
leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself 
become answerable for the other three ! which the said 
public will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and 
caring nothing about the matter all the while ; only always 
ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg 
of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual 
expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military 
apparatus), is at least fifty millions. Now 700/. is to 
50,000,000/. roughly, as seven pence to two thousand 
pounds. Suppose then, a gentleman of unknown income, 
but whose" wealth was to be conjectured from the fact that 
he spent two thousand a year on his park-walls and footmen 
only, professes himself fond of science ; and that one of his 
servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection 
of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had 
for the sum of seven pence sterling ; and that the gentle- 
man, who is fond of science, and spends two thousand a 
year on his park, answers, after keeping his servant waiting 
several months, "Well ! I'll give you four pence for them, if 
you will be answerable for the extra three pence yourself, 
till next year ! " 

34. III. — I say you have despised Art ! "What! " you 
again answer, "have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? 
and do we not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures ? 
and have we not Art schools and institutions, more than 
ever nation had before? " Yes, truly, but all that is for the 
sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as 
coals, and crockery as well as iron ; you would take every 
other nation's bread out of its mouth if you could ; ! not 

1 That was our real idea of " Free Trade " — " All the trade to my- 
self." You find now that by "competition" other people can manage 
to sell something as well as you — and now we call for Protection again. 
Wretches ! 



42 SESAME AND LILIES. 

being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in 
the thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, 
screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" You 
know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances ; you 
fancy that, among your damp, flat fields of clay, you can 
have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchman among his 
bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs ; — 
that art may be learned as book-keeping is, and when 
learned, will give you more books to keep. You care for 
pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills 
pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on the 
walls for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to 
be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by 
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, 
nor whether they are taken care of or not ; in foreign coun- 
tries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the 
world rotting in abandoned wreck — (in Venice you saw the 
Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces containing 
them), and if you heard that all the fine pictures in Europe 
were made into sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, 
it would not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace 
or two of game less in you own bags, in a day's shooting. 
That is your national love of Art. 

35. IV. — You have despised Nature; that is to say, all 
the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The 
French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of 
France ; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of 
the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in 
railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars. 1 
You have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. 

1 1 meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, 
South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places 
to be reverent in, and to worship in ; and that we only care to drive 
through them ; and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 43 

You have tunneled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; 
you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of 
Geneva ; there is not a quiet valley in England that you 
haVe not filled with bellowing fire ; there is no particle left 
of English land which you have not trampled coal ashes 
into 1 — nor any foreign city in which the spread of your 
presence is not marked among its fair old streets and happy 
gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels and 
perfumers' shops : the Alps themselves, which your own 
poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped 
poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, 
and slide down again, with " shrieks of delight." When 
you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice 
to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their 
valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with 
cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive 
hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow- 
fullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the 
deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in 
the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing 
rusty howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich ex- 
pressing their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, 
by assembling in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," 
and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till 
evening. It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of beauty ; 
more pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, 
of mirth. 

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need 
of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely print one 
of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of 
cutting out and throwing into my store-drawer ; here is one 

1 I was singularly strnck, some years ago, by finding all the river 
shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere 
drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away. 



44 SESAME AND LILIES. 

from a Daily Telegraph of an early date this year (1867) 
(date which, though by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily 
discoverable ; for on the back of the slip, there is the 
announcement that " yesterday the seventh of the special 
services of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon 
in St. Paul's ") ; it relates only one of such facts as happen 
now daily ; this, by chance, having taken a form in which it 
came before the coroner. I will print the paragraph in red. 
Be sure, the facts themselves are written in that color in 
a book which we shall all of us, literate or illiterate, have to 
read our page of, some day. 

" An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
fields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 
years. Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said that 
she lived with the deceased and his son in a room at 2, 
Cobb's court, Christ Church. Deceased was a ' translator ' 
of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots ; deceased 
and his son made them into good ones, and then witness 
sold them for what she could get at the shops, which was 
very little indeed. Deceased and his son used to work 
night and day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay 
for the room (2s. a week), so as to keep the home together. 
On Friday night week, deceased got up from his bench and 
began to shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, ' Some- 
body else must finish them when I am gone, for I can do no 
more.' There was no fire, and he said, ' I would be better 
if I was warm.' Witness therefore took two pairs of trans- 
lated boots 1 to sell at the shop, but she could only get 14a 7 . 
for the two pairs, for the pec-ple at the shop said, ' We must 
have our profit.' Witness got i4lbs. of coal and a little 

1 One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the 
good of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear 
no " translated " articles of dress. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 45 

tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make 
the ' translations,' to get money, but deceased died on 
Saturday morning. The family never had enough to eat. — 
Coroner : ' It seems to me deplorable that you did not go 
into the workhouse.' Witness: 'We wanted the comforts 
of our little home.' A juror asked what the comforts were, 
for he only saw a little straw in the corner of the room, the 
windows of which were broken. The witness began to cry, 
and said that they had a quilt and other little things. The 
deceased said he never would go into the workhouse. In 
summer, when the season was good, they sometimes made 
as much as ios. profit in the week. They then always 
saved towards the next week, which was generally a bad 
one. In winter they made not half so much. For three 
years they had been getting from bad to worse. - — Cornelius 
Collins said that he had assisted his father since 1847. 
They used to work so far into the night that both nearly 
lost their eyesight. Witness now had a film over his eyes. 
Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. The 
relieving officer gave him a 4-lb. loaf, and told him if he 
came again he should 'get the stones.' 1 That disgusted 

1 This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously coin- - 
cident in verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may 
remember. It may, perhaps, be well to preserve beside this paragraph 
another cutting out of my store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of 
about a parallel date, Friday, March 10th, 1865: — "The salons of 

Mme. C , who did the honors with clever imitative grace and 

elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in 
fact, with the same male company as one meets at the parties of the 
Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English 
peers and members of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy 
the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor the 
supper-tables were loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your 
readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi- 
monde, I copy the menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests 
(about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Laf- 



4.6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

deceased, and he would have nothing to do with them since. 
They got worse and worse until last Friday week, when 
they had not even a halfpenny to buy a candle. Deceased 
then lay down on the straw, and said he could not live till 
morning. — A juror: 'You are dying of starvation yourself, 
and you ought to go into the house until the summer.' 
Witness : ' If we went in we should die. When we come 
out in the summer we should be like people dropped from 
the sky. No one would know us, and we would not have 
even a room. I could work now if I had food, for my sight 
would get better.' Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased died 
from syncope, from exhaustion, from want of food. The 
deceased had had no bed-clothes. For four months he had 
had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a particle of 
fat in the body. There was no disease, but if there had 
been medical attendance, he might have survived the syn- 
cope or fainting. The coroner having remarked upon the 
painful nature of the case, the jury returned the following 
verdict: 'That deceased died from exhaustion, from want of 
food and the common necessaries of life ; also through 
want of medical aid.' " 

37. "Why would witness not go into the workhouse ? " 
you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against 
the workhouse which the rich have not; for, of course, every 

fitte, Tokay, and Champagne of the finest vintages were served most 
lavishly throughout the morning. After supper dancing was resumed 
with increased animation, and the ball terminated with a chaine dia- 
bolique and a cancan d'enfer at seven in the morning. (Morning- 
service — ' Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the opening eyelids of 
the Morn. — ') Here is the menu: — 'Consomme de volaille a la Bagra- 
tion ; 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bouchees a la Talleyrand. Saumons 
froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de boeuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises 
chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons 
d'ecrevisses, salades venetiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits, gateaux 
mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glaces, Ananas. Dessert." 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 47 

one who takes a pension from Government goes into the 
workhouse on a grand scale ; * only the workhouses for the 
rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called 
play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses for them 
pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at 
home, and allowed them a little introductory peculation with 
the public money, their minds might be reconciled to the 
conditions. Meantime, here are the facts : we make our 
relief either so insulting to them, or so painful, that they 
rather die than take it at our hands ; or, for third alterna- 
tive, we leave them so untaught and foolish that they starve 
like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not knowing what to 
do, or what to ask. I say, you despise compassion ; if you 
did not, such a newspaper paragraph would be as impossible 
in a Christian country as a deliberate assassination per- 
mitted in its public streets. 2 " Christian " did I say ? Alas, 

1 Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how 
it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling 
a week from the country — but no one is ashamed to take a pension of 
a thousand a year. 

2 I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall Gazette 
established ; for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated 
men, in independent position, and of honest purpose, may, indeed, 
become all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor 
will, therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my 
respect for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third 
number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense 
wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a false 
turn of thought in the outset, and is following it, regardless of conse- 
quences. It contained at the end this notable passage: — 

" The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bed- 
steads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought 
to give to outcasts merely as outcasts." I merely put beside this expres- 
sion of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message 
which Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a trumpet" in 



48 SESAME AND LILIES. 

if we were but wholesomely ^/-Christian, it would be 
impossible ; it is our imaginary Christianity that helps us to 
commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in our faith, 
for the lewd sensation of it ; dressing it up, like everything 
else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organ and 
aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival — the Christianity 
which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, 
with our play about the devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, 
■ — Fausts ; chanting hymns through traceried windows for 
back-ground effect, and artistically modulating the " Dio " 
through variation on variation of mimicked prayer (while 
we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit of uncultivated 
swearers, upon what we suppose to be the signification of 
the Third Commandment); — this gas-lighted, and gas- 
inspired, Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back 
the hem of our robes from the touch of the heretics who 
dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian righteous- 
ness in a plain English word or deed ; to make Christian 

declaring to the gentlemen of his day : " Ye fast for strife, and to 
smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have 
chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor 
that are cast out (margin ' afflicted ') to thy house." The falsehood on 
which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously stated by 
him, was this : " To confound the functions of the dispensers of the 
poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charitable institution is a 
great and pernicious error." This sentence is so accurately and 
exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds 
before we can deal with any existing problem of national distress. " To 
understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates are the almoners of the 
nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom of 
hand as much greater and franker than that possible to individual 
charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be supposed 
greater than those of any single person, is the foundation of all law 
respecting pauperism." (Since this was written the Pall Mall Gazette 
has become a mere party paper — like the rest ; but it writes well, and 
does more good than mischief on the whole.) 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 49 

law any rule of life, and found one National act or hope 
thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to for 
that ! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke 
than true action or passion out of your modern English 
religion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the 
organ-pipes, both ; leave them, and the Gothic windows, and 
the painted glass, to the property-man ; give up your car- 
buretted hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration, and look 
after Lazarus at the door-step. For there is a true Church 
wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is 
the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever 
shall be. 

3&. All these pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I 
repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men 
among you who do not ; by whose work, by whose strength, 
by whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank 
them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all 
be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. 
The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane 
all night to watch the guilt you have created there, and 
may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at 
any moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor wrestling 
with the sea's rage ; the quiet student poring over his book 
or his vial ; the common worker, without praise, and nearly 
without bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your 
carts, hopeless, and spurned of all ;' these are the men by 
whom England lives ; but they are not the nation ; they are 
only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from old 
habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. 
Our National wish and purpose are to be amused ; our 
National religion is the performance of church ceremonies, 
and preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the 
mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves ; and the 
necessity for this amusement is fastening on us as a feverous 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. 

disease of parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless, 
dissolute, merciless. 1 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement 
grows out of their work, as the color-petals out of a fruitful 
flower; — when they are faithfully helpful and compassion- 
ate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and 
vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse of the body. But 
now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine 
energy into the false business of money-making ; and hav- 
ing no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, 
but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their 
pictures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. 
The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and 
on the stage ; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we sub- 
stitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human 
nature of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some 
kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with our 
fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, 
we gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather the 
night-clew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these 
things ; the facts are frightful enough ; — the measure of 
national fault involved in them is, perhaps, not as great as 
it would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of 
deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire to houses, 
and ravage peasants' fields ; yet we should be sorry to find 
we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart ; still 
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at 
the end of his long life, having had much power with the 
public, being plagued in some serious matter by a reference 

1 How literally that word Dis-~Ea.se ; the Negation and impossibility 
of Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our English Industry and its. 
Amusements. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 5 1 

to "public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, 
" The public is just a great baby ! " And the reason that I 
have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix 
themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, 
is that, the more I see of our national faults and miseries, 
the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish 
illiterateness, and want of education in the most ordinary 
habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, 
not dullness of brain, which we have to lament ; but an 
unreachable schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from 
ihe true schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, 
because it acknowledges no master. 

41. There is a curious type of us given in one of the 
lovely, neglected works of the last of our great painters. It 
is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its 
brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky bevond. 
And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who have 
left these for other valleys and for other skies, a group of 
schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to 
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the 
words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far 
from us with our bitter, reckless will ; little thinking that 
those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not 
only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted 
vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who 
would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how 
to call them by their names. How often, even if we lift the 
marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those old 
kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and 
stir the crowns on their foreheads ; and still they are silent 
to us, and seem but a dusty imagery ; because we know not 
the incantation of the heart that would wake them; — which, 
if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their 
power of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider 



52 SESAME AND LILIES. 

us; and, as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, 
saying, " Art thou also become weak as we — art thou also 
become one of us ? " so would these kings, with their 
undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, "Art thou 
also become pure and mighty of heart as we ? art thou also 
become one of us ? " 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — " magnanimous " 
— to be this, is, indeed, to be great in life ; to become this 
increasingly, is, indeed, to "advance in life," — in life 
itself — not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you 
remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a 
house died ? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and 
set in his chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses ; 
and each of them placed him at his table's head, and all 
feasted in his presence ? Suppose it were offered to you, in 
plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that you 
should gain this Scythian honor, gradually, while you yet 
thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this : You 
shall die slowly ; your blood shall daily grow cold, your 
flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted group 
of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and sink 
through the earth into the ice of Caina ; but, day by day, 
your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher 
chariots, and have more orders on its breast — crowns on 
its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and 
shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets ; 
build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all 
the night long ; your soul shall stay enough within it to 
know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress 
on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the 
skull,- — no more. Would you take the offer, verbally 
made by the death-angel ? Would the meanest among us 
take it, think you ? Yet practically and verily we grasp at 
it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp at it in 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 53 

its fullness of horror. Every man accepts it, who desires to 
advance in life without knowing what life is ; who means 
only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and 
more fortune, and more public honor, and — not more per- 
sonal soul. " He only is advancing in life, whose heart is 
getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, 
whose spirit is entering into Living peace. And the men 
who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the 
earth — they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as 
they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of 
theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties, — 
costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of 
tinsel, — but still only the toys of nations ; or else, they are 
no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and 
practical issue of national folly ; for which reason I have 
said of them elsewhere, " Visible governments are the toys 
of some nations, the diseases of others, the harness of some, 
the burdens of more." 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with which I 
hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, 
as if governed nations were a personal property, and might 
be bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of 
whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was 
to gather ; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, 
"people-eating," were the constant and proper title of all 
monarchs; and enlargement of a king's dominion meant the 
same thing as the increase of a private man's estate ! 
Kings who think so, however powerful, can no more be the 
true kings of the nation than gad-flies are the kings of a 
horse ; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide 
it. They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one 
could see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, 
with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered, trum- 
peting in the summer air ; the twilight being, perhaps, some- 



54 SESAME AND LILIES. 

times fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering 
mists of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule 
quietly, if at all, and hate ruling ; too many of them make 
"il gran reniito" 1 ; and if they do not, the mob, as soon as 
they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make 
its "gran rifiiito " of them. 

44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some 
day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion 
by the force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It 
matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, 
or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter 
to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, 
"Go," and he goeth ; and to another, "Come," and he 
cometh. "Whether you can turn your people, as you can 
Trent — and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people 
hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by you. 
You may measure your dominion by multitudes better than 
by miles ; and count degrees of love latitude, not from, but 
to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator. 

45. Measure ! nay, you cannot measure. Who shall 
measure the difference between the power of those who " do 
and teach," and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, 
as of heaven — and the power of those who undo, and con- 
sume — whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of the 
moth and the rust ? Strange ! to think how the Moth-kings 
lay up treasures for the moth ; and the Rust-kings, who are 
to their peoples' strength as rust to armor, lay up treasures 
for the rust; and the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; 
but how few kings have ever laid up treasures that needed 
no guarding — treasures of which, the more thieves there 
were, the better ! Broidered robe, only to be rent ; helm 
and sword, only to be dimmed ; jewel and gold, only to be 

1 The great renunciation. 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 55 

scattered ; — there have been three kinds of kings who have 
gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth 
order of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of 
long ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, which 
the jewel and gold could not equal, neither should it be 
valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the weaving, by 
Athena's shuttle ; an armor, forged in divine fire by Vul- 
canian force — a gold to be mined in the sun's red heart, 
where he sets over the Delphian cliffs ; — deep-pictured 
tissue, impenetrable armor, potable gold ! — the three great 
Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, 
-and waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with their 
winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes, by the 
path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye 
has not seen ! Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard 
and believed this word, and at last gathered and brought 
forth treasures of — Wisdom — for their people ? 

46. Think what an amazing business -that would be ! 
How inconceivable, in the state of our present national 
wisdom ! That we should bring up our peasants to a book 
exercise instead of a bayonet exercise! — organize, drill, 
maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, 
instead of armies of stabbers! — find national amusement in 
reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a 
fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. 
What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the 
wealth of the capitalists of civilized nations should ever 
come to support literature instead of war! 

47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single 
sentence out of the only book, properly to be called a book, 
that I have yet written myself, the one that will stand (if 
anything stand) surest and longest of all work of mine. 

" It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in 
Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports 



56 SESAME AND LILIES. , 

unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to sup- 
port them ; for most of the men who wage such, wage them 
gratis ; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls have 
both to be bought ; and the best tools of war for them 
besides, which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not 
to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, 
between nations which have not grace nor honesty enough 
in all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with ; 
as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each 
other ten millions' sterling worth of consternation, annually 
(a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, 
sown, reaped, and granaried by the ' science ' of the modern 
political economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). 
And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of 
the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are 
repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to 
have no will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the 
primary root of the war ; but its real root is the covetousness 
of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frank- 
ness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, 
his own separate loss and punishment to each person." 

48. P'rance and England literally, observe, buy panic of 
each other ; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand 
thousand pounds' worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, 
instead of buying these ten millions' worth of panic annually, 
they made up their minds to be at peace with each other, 
and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge annually ; and 
that each nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a 
year in founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal 
museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not 
be better somewhat for both French and English ? 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. 
Nevertheless, I hope it will not be long before royal or 
national libraries will be founded in every considerable city, 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 57 

with a royal series of books in them ; the same series in 
every one of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, 
prepared for that national series in the most perfect way 
possible ; their text printed all on leaves of equal size, 
broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in 
the hand, beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples 
of binders' work ; and that these great libraries will be 
accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of 
the day and evening ; strict law being enforced for this 
cleanliness and quietness. 

I could shape for you other plans, for art galleries, and for 
natural history galleries, and for many precious — many, it 
seems to me, needful — things; but this book plan is the 
easiest and needfullest, and would prove a considerable 
tonic to what we call our British constitution, which has 
fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil 
hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn 
laws repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws estab- 
lished for it, dealing in a better bread; — bread made of 
that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens 
doors ; — doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries. 

50. Note to If 30. — Respecting the increase of rent by 
the deaths of the poor, for evidence of which, see the preface 
to the Medical officer's report to the Privy Council, just 
published, there are suggestions in its preface which will 
make some stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me 
note these points following : — 

There are two theories on the subject of land now abroad, 
and in contention ; both false. 

The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have always 
existed, and must continue to exist, a certain number of 
hereditarily sacred persons to whom the earth, air, and 
water of the world belong, as personal property ; of which 



58 SESAME AND LILIES. 

earth, air, and water, these persons may, at their pleasure, 
permit, or forbid, the rest of the human race to eat, breathe, 
or to drink. This theory is not for many years longer 
tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of the land 
of the world among the mob of the world would immediately 
elevate the said mob into sacred personages ; that houses 
would then build themselves, and corn grow of itself ; and 
that everybody would be able to live, without doing any 
work for his living. This theory would also be found highly 
untenable in practice. 

It will, however, require some rough experiments, and 
rougher catastrophes, before the generality of persons will 
be convinced that no law concerning anything, least of all 
concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting 
it high, or renting it low — would be of the smallest ultimate 
use to the people — so long as the general contest for life, 
and for the means of life, remains one of mere brutal com- 
petition. That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take 
one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make against 
it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law foi 
England, if it could be carried, that maximum limits should 
be assigned to incomes according to classes ; and that every 
nobleman's income should be paid to him as a fixed salary or 
pension by the nation; and not squeezed by him in variable 
sums, at discretion, out of the tenants of his land. But if 
you could get such a law passed to-morrow, and if, which 
would be farther necessary, you could fix the value of the 
assigned incomes by making a given weight of pure bread 
for a given sum, a twelve-month would not pass before 
another currency would have been tacitly established, and 
the power of accumulative wealth would have reasserted 
itself in some other article, or some other imaginary sign. 
There is only one cure for public distress — and that is 
public education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, 



OF KINGS TREASURIES. 59 

and just. There are, indeed, many laws conceivable which 
would gradually better and strengthen the national temper ; 
but, for the most part, they are such as the national temper 
must be much bettered before it would bear. A nation 
in its youth may be helped by laws, as a weak child by 
backboards, but when it is old, it cannot that way straighten 
its crooked spine. 

And besides ; the problem of land, at its worst, is a by 
one ; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question 
remains inexorable, — Who is to dig it? Which of us, in 
brief words, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest — 
and for what pay ? Who is to do the pleasant and clean 
work, and for what pay? Who is to do no work, and. for 
what pry? And there are curious moral and religious ques- 
tions connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a 
portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in order to 
put the abstracted psychical quantities together and make 
one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to deal with 
mere blood, instead of spirit (and the thing might literally 
be done — as it has been done with infants before now) — 
so that it were possible by taking a certain quantity of blood 
from the arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it 
all into one person, to make a more azure-blooded gentle- 
man of him, the thing would of course be managed ; but 
secretly, I should conceive. But now, because it is brain 
and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be done 
quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, 
after the manner of weasels ; that is to say, we keep a 
certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and gener- 
ally stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis, may have 
all the thinking and feeling to ourselves. Yet there is a 
great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and trained 
English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more 
a lady) is a great production, — a better production than 



60 SESAME AND LILIES. 

most statues ; being beautifully colored as well as shaped, 
and plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to look at, a 
wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot have it, any 
more than a pyramid or a church, but by sacrifice of much 
contributed life. And it is, perhaps, better to build a 
beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple 
— and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature 
far above us, than to a wall ; only the beautiful human 
creature will have some duties to do in return — duties of 
living belfry and rampart — of which presently. 



ANNOTATIONS. 

i. Sesame: originally, a plant yielding an oily grain used by 
Eastern nations for food. The reference here is to its use as a 
talismanic word : the cave of the forty thieves in a tale of the 
"Arabian Nights" is opened and closed by the magic words, 
"Open, Sesame!" — "Shut Sesame!" Mr. Ruskin uses it to 
denote the key by which the treasuries of book-lore may be 
unlocked. 

2. Double-belled doors : many houses of the rich in London 
have two bells ; one for visitors, the other for those who call on 
business. 

3. The last infirmity of noble minds : these words are borrowed 
from Milton's "Lycidas": — 

" Fame, the spur which the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of noble minds) 
To scorn delights and live laborious clays." 

4. My Lord: three archbishops of the Established Church of 
England, together with twenty-seven bishops, constitute the 
" Lords Spiritual " of the Upper House in Parliament ; and are, 
consequently, addressed as " My Lord." 

1 1 . Entree (Ang-tra') : entrance, admission. 



ANNOTATIONS. 6 1 

12. Elys'ian gates: the gates of Elysium, the name used by 
the Greeks to describe the home of the blessed dead ; those 
whose good deeds while in life had exceeded the sum of their evil 
deeds. 

Portieres (Por-ti-air') : door-screens ; here, doors or gates to the 
houses of the great. 

Faubourg St. Germain (Fo-boor San Zhar-mang'): a portion of 
Paris in which the nobility formerly resided. 

15. Canaille (Can-a'yuh) : the rabble. 

Noblesse: Fr. nobility. By " the national noblesse of words" 
Ruskin means those words which, in any country, are pure in their 
origin ; i.e., are neither derived from nor compounded with words 
belonging to another language. 

16. Chameleon-cloaks, — groundlion cloaks : the chameleon, or 
ground-lion, is a kind of lizard whose color is said to change so as 
to harmonize with the color of its surroundings. 

18. Eccles'ia : from this Greek word, which originally meant 
any public meeting, has been derived the English word ecclesi- 
astical, which is limited to affairs of the Church. 

Presbyter: originally, simply an elder. 

19. Max Miiller (Mil'ler) : a distinguished German scholar, 
formerly professor of modern languages at Oxford. The lectures, 
referred to are those on " The Science of Language." 

20. The pilot of the Galilean lake: St. Peter. — See Matt. iv. 
18-22. 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain: See Matt. xvi. 18, 
19. The idea that the keys are of iron and gold is Milton's own. 
The iron symbolizes harsh punishment ; the gold symbolizes love, 
the key to heavenly joy. 

Mitred locks : a figurative expression which, expanded, means 
his head upon which is worn a 7>iitre or tall bishop \f cap, symbol 
of authority in the Church. 

Enow (Old Eng.) : enough. 

Worthy bidden guest: See Matt. xxii. 3, 8, 9. 

Recks (Old Eng.) : cares. This is an old idiom, meaning, 
What care is it to them ? 

Sped : provided for. 



62 SESAME AND LILIES. 

List (Old Eng.) : please, choose. 

Scrannel pipes of wretched straw : the word scrannel is 
thought to have been invented by Milton, and may mean either 
thin or screeching. The entire phrase forcibly characterizes the 
worthlessness of these false bishops' teaching. 

Rank mist: unwholesome and corrupting doctrines. 

Episcopal function : the duty belonging to the office of bishop. 

22. The word office as it occurs in this section is used in its 
original Latin sense ; viz., duty. 

Salisbury steeple : the highest spire in England ; 404 feet high. 

23. Cretinous: idiotic ; — so-called from cretin, a Swiss name 
for a deformed and helpless idiot. 

24. The rock-apostle : Peter, — literally, a rock. See Matt.xvi.18. 

25. Cranmer: an English statesman, divine, and reformer, 
made archbishop of Canterbury and prime minister by Henry 
VIII. Under Queen Mary, lie was burned at the stake (1556) 
on a charge of heresy. 

St. Francis: founder of the Franciscan order of mendicant 
friars, about 1210 A.D. 

St. Dominic : founder of the order of Dominicans, or Preach- 
ing Friars, 121 5 A.D. 

Him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him: Caiaphas — 
(see John xi. 49, 50). Dante (Inferno xxiii. 3) represents him 
as punished by being crucified and transfixed to the ground by 
three stakes driven through his body. 

" Disleso, tan to vibnente^ nelV eterno csi/io " : " distended so 
ignominiously in the eternal exile." — Inferno xxiii. 126. 

Him whom Dante stood beside : Nicholas III, whom Dante 
represents as punished for fraud by being buried head downward 
with his feet protruding from the earth. 

" Come V frate che confessa lo perjido assassin 1 ': "like the 
friar who is hearing the confession of a treacherous assassin." — 
Inferno xix. 49. 

Alighieri (Al-e-ge-a'-ree) : Dante's family-name. 

28. Mimosa : a species of leguminous plants. The one here 
referred to is the sensitive plant, so called because the leaves 
shrink and fold when touched. 



ANNOTATIONS. 63 

29. Junketings : private feastings. 

Puppet-shows : mock dramas performed by little images moved 
by wires. 

30. Othello: the Moor of Venice in Shakespeare's play of the 
same name. 

32. Biblio-maniac : one who is insane on the subject of books. 

34. Ludgate apprentices: the apprentices of the Ludgate Hill 
District in London cried "What d'ye lack?" when advertising 
their masters' wares on the street. 

35. Schaffhausen : capital of a Swiss canton of the same name. 
Three miles below the town are the beautiful falls of the Rhine, 
of which Ruskin has given an eloquent description in " Modern 
Painters." 

Lucerne: a Swiss lake on whose shores the patriotic deeds of 
Tell are said to have taken place. 

Tell's Chapel : a chapel dedicated to the virtues of William 
Tell, a legendary hero of Switzerland. 

Chamouni (Sha-mou-nee') : a picturesque Alpine valley of 
France, 2000 feet above Lake Geneva. Its sublime beauty has 
inspired some noble poems, one of the finest being that by 
Coleridge. 

Zurich (Zoo'rik) : a lake and canton of Switzerland. 

36. Spit'alfields : a section of London, seat of an important 
silk manufacture. 

Translator: literally, one who carries across; i.e., one who 
changes something into another form. In this case, one who 
makes new boots of old ones. 

37. Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts : titles of dramas in 
which the Devil is introduced as one of the characters. 

Dio (De'-o) : Italian word for God. 
Lazarus : see Luke xvi. 20. 

40. Chalmers: the most eminent Scottish divine of the present 
century. 

41. Kirkby Lonsdale : a market town of England, County of 
Westmoreland. Its location is picturesque. 

Ha'des : the name given by the Greeks to the kingdom of Pluto, 
or the realm of the dead. 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

42. Scyth'ian : pertaining to Scythia, a name given in ancient 
times to the country north and east of the Black Sea, the Caspian, 
and the Sea of Aral. 

Living peace : see Romans vi. 8. 
Harness : here, armor or defense. 

43. Achilles (A-kiHes): the hero of Homer's " Iliad." 

44. Can'tel : a piece shaped like a half-moon. 

45. Athen'a: the Greek goddess of wisdom and of arts. Her 
Roman name is Minerva. 

Vulcanian : pertaining to Vulcan, the Greek god of fire and 
the forge, who presided over the working of metals : the word is 
also used to signify volcanic force. 

Delphian : pertaining to Delphi in Greece, the seat of a 
renowned oracle of Apollo, the sun-god. 

Deep pictured tissue : a fabric so interwoven with gold and 
colors as to form pictures. 

Potable : drinkable. 

47. Taxation : about seventy-five cents out of every dollar of 
taxes levied in England is spent either in paying the interest on 
old war debts, or in making preparation for future wars. 

48. Panic : extreme fright affecting a number of persons at 
once : so named because, according to Herodotus, the Greek god 
Pan struck such a sudden terror into the Persians at the battle of 
Marathon. 

49. Corn-laws: laws that imposed a heavy duty on all grain 
(corn) imported into England, thus making bread dear, and caus- 
ing great distress among the laboring classes. These laws were 
repealed in 1849. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

In this lecture, which is a further exposition of the 
thought of " Kings' Treasuries," Mr. Ruskin gives with 
great force his views concerning the education and duties 
of woman. 

The purpose of education is the same for both men and 
women, viz., the acquiring of power which shall be used in 
blessing and redeeming society ; in converting the desert 
places of human life into gardens of fragrant beauty. For 
the only true kingship and queenship is that "which consists 
in a stronger moral state and a truer thoughtful state, than 
that of others." 

Since education, then, fits for duty, it is important to 
consider what are the duties of woman. It is Mr. Ruskin's 
opinion that to speak of the mission and the rights of 
woman is to assume that the nature and the interests of 
men and women are antagonistic. Not less erroneous is 
the idea that woman is inferior to man, and therefore to 
yield him servile obedience. 

The intention in all life is harmony. To produce this 
harmony in human life, the right understanding and accept- 
ance of the relations of the womanly and the manly mind, 
and their duty each to each are essential. 

Since to use books rightly is "to be led by them into 
wider sight" when our own knowledge is insufficient, 
Ruskin seeks to discover the opinion of "the wisest, the 



66 SESAME AND LILIES. 

purest-hearted of all ages " concerning the " true dignity of 
womin and her mode of help to man." Shakespeare, that 
master-interpreter of man to himself, represents women as 
" infallibly faithful and wise counselors," — distinguished by 
heroic action and fortitude — "strong to sanctify even when 
they cannot save." Walter Scott, who "has given the 
broadest view of modern society," pictures woman as com- 
bining intellectual strength with feminine grace and tender- 
ness, as moved by a high sense of justice; as actuated by 
fearless, self-sacrificing devotion to duty ; as animated by 
such wisdom and self-controlled affection as exalts not only 
her own character, but that of her lover. This exalted 
portraiture of womanly dignity and virtue and power finds 
its counterpart in the great poems of all ages. But this 
view of the character and power of woman is contrary to 
the commonly accepted idea of the marriage relation which 
assumes that the woman is inferior, and, therefore, properly 
subject to her husband. 

The appeal is next made to the human heart. In chivalry, 
the embodiment of the Christian ideal, the knight voluntarily 
submits to be directed by the lady of his choice, whose com- 
mands, dictated by love and wise foresight, he feels himself 
honored in obeying. Mr. Ruskin deprecates the fact that, 
among us, marriage so often puts an end to this knightly, 
reverent devotion. The noble picture which he paints of 
harmonious family life, — the home that is the "place of 
Peace" — had been daily realized for him from his earliest 
recollection. The "guiding, determining function," which 
he assigns to woman, was that of his mother, whose serene, 
self-centred dignity made her home a sacred shrine of order 
and holy peace. 

Happy all who can give such testimony to a harmonious 
home-life as this of Ruskin's : — "I had never heard my 
father's or mother's voice once raised in any question with 



INTRODUCTORY. 6j 

each other ; nor seen an angry, or even slightly hurt or 
offended glance, in the eye of either. I had never heard a 
servant scolded ; nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any 
severe manner blamed. I had never seen a moment's 
trouble or disorder in any household matter ; nor anything 
whatever either done in a hurry, or undone (not done) in 
due time." 

Woman's true place and honor, then, is to be the guide, the 
counselor, the director of man. But to be capable of this 
guidance, she must be good, wise, and always ready to serve. 

The lecture considers, in the second place, what kind of 
education will fit the girl for this high dignity of gracious 
womanhood. 

First, that perfection of womanly beauty may be attained, 
she must have such physical training as will secure harmoni- 
ous bodily development. Second, she should be trained in 
habits of accurate thinking ; she should become acquainted 
with the beauty and the laws of nature ; humility should be 
bred as the result of such a view of the vast expanse of 
desirable knowledge as to cause her to feel how limited is 
hers by comparison ; her imagination should be so cultivated 
as to develop such an active sympathy with human suffering, 
as will express itself in helpful deeds. 

Theology, as mere intellectual speculation, Mr. Ruskin 
would have women avoid ; but the higher science of prac- 
tical religion they should realize in every-day life. 

All superficial study is weakening ; but while the course 
pursued should, in Mr. Ruskin's opinion, be the same for 
girls as for boys, he would have the former apply their 
knowledge in the daily home life and in social service. 

" Let a girl's education be as serious as a boy's." Fri- 
volity in women is the logical result of false, superficial 
education. The virtues which we call manly should also 
be developed to be the strength of woman. 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

A well-chosen course of reading in history, poetry, and 
fiction, together with the influence of the best models in art, 
will give true standards of elevated thought and life. Above 
all, see that her teachers have a personality fitted to inspire 
reverence and that such respect shall be aroused by parental 
example. Lastly, the quiet, loving companionship of nature, 
with her mystical influences, upon the sensitive soul of the 
child, is a powerful agency in the development of the finer 
qualities. 

Mr. Ruskin concludes this portion of his lecture with a 
protest against the mercenary spirit of the age, which has 
led to the defacing of the natural beauty of England by 
digging in mines, building manufactories, and constructing 
lines of railroads. The Greek imagination peopled Par- 
nassus with the Muses, but the equally beautiful Mount 
Snowdon awakens in the minds of Englishmen no thrill 
of reverent awe ; the national mind is insensible to the 
holy beauty of nature. 

Mr. Ruskin believes that the true expansion of woman's 
duty, equally with that of man, leads to service to the state. 
Among the inextinguishable instincts deeply implanted in 
the soul of man is the love of power, "which, rightly 
directed, maintains all the majesty and law of life." 

What shall be the purpose and scope of this power? To 
redeem, not to destroy, — the sweetening and purifying of 
human lives. 

The noble title of Lady is not to be assumed for the sake 
of selfish distinction, but to represent the true "loaf-giver" 
who ministers to all the wants of the Master's little ones, — 
his representatives on earth. Then shall women become 
truly queens whose reign is one of duty, whose ambition is 
to bless with kindly helpfulness. 

Mr. Ruskin charges upon woman's indifference the re- 
sponsibility of much of the warfare, the injustice, and the 



of queens' gardens. 69 

misery in the world. With eloquent force, he appeals to 
the educated women of England to renounce self-indulgent 
ease and pleasure, and to devote themselves to nourishing 
into healthy, happy life the feeble child-flowers who are 
struggling with the sharp blasts of poverty and injustice. 
Then they shall, indeed, walk as queens in the gardens 
made beautiful with the lilies of joyous lives tended by 
their care. 



LECTURE II. — LILIES. 1 

OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 

" Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert ; let the desert be made cheerful, 
and bloom as the lily ; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild 
with wood." — Isaiah xxxv, i. (Septuagint.) 

51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel 
of one previously given, that I should shortly state to you 
my general intention in both. The questions specially pro- 
posed to you in the first, namely, How and What to Read, 
rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavor to 
make you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, Why to 
Read. I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advan- 
tages we possess in the present day in the diffusion of 
education and of literature, can only be rightly used by 
any of us when we have apprehended clearly what educa- 
tion is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to 
see that both well-directed moral training and well-chosen 
reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided 
and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in 
the truest sense, kingly ; conferring indeed the purest king- 

1 This lecture was given December 14, 1864, at the Town Hall, Man- 
chester, in aid of the St. Andrews' Schools. 



yO SESAME AND LILIES. 

ship that can exist among men: too many other kingships 
(however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) 
being either spectral, or tyrannous; — Spectral — that is to 
say, aspects and shows only of royalty, hollow as death, and 
which only the " Likeness of a kingly crown have on " ; or 
else tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their own will 
for the law of justice and love by which all true kings rule. 

52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this 
idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only 
one pure kind of kingship ; an inevitable and external kind, 
crowned or not : the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that 
of others ; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise 
them. Observe that word " State " ; we have got into a 
loose way of using it. It means literally the standing and 
stability of a thing ; and you have the full force of it in the 
derived word " statue " — " the immovable thing." A king's 
majesty or "state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be 
called a state, depends on the movelessness of both : — 
without tremor, without quiver of balance ; established and 
enthroned upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing 
can alter, nor overthrow. 

53. Believing that all literature and all education are only 
useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, 
and therefore kingly, power — first, over ourselves, and, 
through ourselves, over all around us, I am now going to 
ask you to consider with me farther, what special portion or 
kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education, 
may rightly be possessed by women ; and how far they also 
are called to a true queenly power. Not in their house- 
holds merely, but over all within their sphere. And in what 
sense, if they rightly understood and exercised this royal 
or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by 
such benignant power would justify us in speaking of the 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 7 1 

territories over which each of them reigned, as "Queens' 
Gardens." 

54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far 
deeper question, which — strange though this may seem — 
remains among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of 
its infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 
should be. We cannot consider how education may fit 
them for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed 
what is their true constant duty. And there never was a 
time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagina- 
tion permitted, respecting this question — quite vital to all 
social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the 
manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or of 
virtue, seem never to have been yet estimated with entire 
consent. We hear of the " mission " and of the "rights " of 
Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the mission 
and the rights of Man; — as if she and her lord were 
creatures of independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim. 
This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong — perhaps 
even more foolishly wrong (for I will anticipate thus far 
what I hope to prove) — is the idea that woman is only 
the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a 
thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether 
in her weakness, by the preeminence of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her 
who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could 
be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave ! 

2^. I. — Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some 
clear and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) 
of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with 
respect to man's ; and how their relations rightly accepted, 
aid, and increase, the vigor, and honor, and authority of both. 



72 SESAME AND LILIES. 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last 
lecture : namely, that the first use of education was to 
enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest men 
on all points of earnest difficulty. That to use books 
rightly, was to go to them for help : to appeal to them, 
when our own knowledge and power of thought failed: to 
be led by them into wider sight — purer conception — than 
our own, and receive from them the united sentence of the 
judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and 
unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the 
wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise 
on this point: let us hear the testimony they have left 
respecting what they held to be the true dignity of woman, 
and her mode of help to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes ; 
— he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic 
figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the 
Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage : and the 
still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 
In his labored and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello 
would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so 
great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round 
him ; but he is the only example even approximating to the 
heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony, stand in flawed 
strength, and fall by their vanities; — Hamlet is indolent, 
and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an impatient boy ; the 
Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fort- 
une ; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but 
too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical 
time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Or- 
lando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, 
followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 73 

hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast 
in grave hope and errorless purpose: Cordelia, Desdemona, 
Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Perdita, 
Silvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps love- 
liest, Virgilia, are all faultless : conceived in the highest 
heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly, 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the 
folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is 
by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, 
there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to 
his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his mis- 
understanding of his children ; the virtue of his one true 
daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the 
others, unless he had cast her away from him ; as it is, she 
all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; — nor the one 
weakness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his 
perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman char- 
acter in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony 
against his error : — " Oh, murderous coxcomb ! What 
should such a fool Do with so good a wife ? " 

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of the 
wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience 
of her husband. In Winter's Tale and in Cymbeline, the 
happiness and existence of two princely households, lost 
through long years, and imperiled to the death by the folly 
and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the 
queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure 
for Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, and the foul 
cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victorious 
truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, 
the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved 
her son from all evil ; his momentary forgetfulness of it 



74 SESAME AND LILIES. 

is his ruin; her prayer at last granted, saves him — not, 
indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as the 
destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickle- 
ness of a lover who is a mere wicked child ? — of Helena, 
against the petulance and insult of a careless youth? — of 
the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly 
devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," who appears 
among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive 
passions of men, as a gentle angel, bringing courage and 
safety by her presence, and defeating the worst malignities 
of crime by what women are fancied most to fail in, — 
precision and accuracy of thought. 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal figures in 
Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak woman ■ — - 
Ophelia ; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical 
moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to 
him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe 
follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women 
among the principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and 
Goneril, they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to 
the ordinary laws of life ; fatal in their influence also in pro- 
portion to the power for good which they have abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
position and character of women in human life. He repre- 
sents them as infallibly faithful and wise counselors, — 
incorruptibly just and pure examples — strong always to 
sanctify, even when they cannot save. 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the 
nature of man, — still less in his understanding of the 
causes and courses of fate, — but only as the writer who has 
given us the broadest view of the conditions and modes of 
ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you next to 
receive the witness of Walter Scott. 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 75 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
value ; and though the early romantic poetry is very beauti- 
ful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's 
ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear 
a true witness ; and, in the whole range of these, there are 
but three men who reach the heroic type 1 — Dandie Din- 
mont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse ; of these, one is a border 
farmer ; another a freebooter ; the third a soldier in a bad 
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their 
courage and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, 
or mistakenly applied, intellectual power ; while his younger 
men are the gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, and 
only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not 
vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any 
disciplined, or consistent character, earnest in a purpose 
wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, 
definitely challenged, and resolutely subdued, there is no 
trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in his 
imaginations of women, — in the characters of Ellen Douglas, 
of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, 
Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice 
Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless varieties of grace, 
tenderness, and intellectual power we find in all a quite 
infallible and inevitable sense of dignity and justice ; a 
fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice to even the 
appearance of duty, much more to its real claims ; and, 

1 I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have 
noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great 
characters of men in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrow- 
ness of thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in 
Edward Glendinning, and the like ; and I ought to have noticed that 
there are ^everal quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the 
backgrounds; three — let us accept joyously this courtesy to England 
and her soldiers — are English officers: Colonel Gardiner, Colonel 
Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 



y6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, 
which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a 
momentary error ; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts 
the characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of 
the tale, we are just able, and no more, to take patience in 
hearing of their unmerited success. 

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it 
is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the 
youth ; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches 
over, or educates his mistress. 

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testimony — 
that of the great Italians and Greeks. You know well the 
plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love poem to his 
dead lady ; a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 
Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 
destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally 
astray in despair ; she comes down from heaven to his help, 
and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, inter- 
preting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human, 
and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began I 
could not cease ; besides, you might think this a wild 
imagination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to 
you a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of 
Pisa to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling 
of all the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth 
century, preserved among many other such records of 
knightly honor and love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered 
for us from among the early Italian poets. 

" For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee ; 
And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 



OF QUEENS* GARDENS. 77 

" Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
Since thus my will was set 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence ; 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
A pain or regret, 
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense ; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — ■ 
That in thy gift is wisdom's best avail, 

And honor without fail j 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

" Lady, since I conceived 
That pleasurable aspect in my heart, 

My life has been apart 
In shining brightness and the place of truth; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darken'd place, 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remember'd good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

6 1. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have 
had a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. 
His spiritual subjection to them was, indeed, not so abso- 
lute ; but as regards their own personal character, it was 
only because you could not have followed me so easily, that 
I did not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's ; 
and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and 
faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache ; 
the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra ; the playful 
kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa ; the 
housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon 



?8 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the sea ; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety 
of the sister and daughter, in Antigone ; the bowing down 
of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent ; and, finally, the expecta- 
tion of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the 
Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, 
to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitter- 
ness of death. 

62. Now, I could multiply witness upon witness of this 
kind upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and 
show you why he wrote a Legend of Good Women ; but no 
Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show 
you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and 
sometimes vanquished ; but the soul of Una is never dark- 
ened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I 
could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient 
times, and show you how the great people, — by one of 
whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all 
the earth should be educated, rather than by his own 
kindred ; — how that great Egyptian people, wisest then ol 
nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a 
woman ; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver's 
shuttle ; and how the name and the form of that spirit, 
adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that 
Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in 
whom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most 
precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
element ; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value to 
the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, — 
consistent, as you see it is, on this head. I will ask you 
whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main 
work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious 
and idle view of the relations between man and woman ; — 
nay, worse than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 79 

imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but this, their 
ideal of woman, is, according to our common idea of the 
marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, 
is not to guide, nor even to think for herself. The man is 
always to be the wiser ; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, 
the superior in knowledge and discretion, as in power. 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds 
on this matter ? Are all these great men mistaken, or are 
we? Are Shakespeare and Aeschylus, Dante and Homer, 
merely dressing dolls for us ; or, worse than dolls, unnat- 
ural visions, the realization of which, were it possible, 
would bring anarchy into all households and ruin into all 
affections ? Nay, if you could suppose this, take lastly the 
evidence of facts, given by the human heart itself. In all 
Christian ages which have been remarkable for their purity 
or progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient 
devotion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedient; — 
not merely enthusiastic and worshiping in imagination, 
but entirely subject, receiving from the beloved woman, 
however young, not only the encouragement, the praise, 
and the reward of all toil, but so far as any choice is open, 
or any question difficult of decision, the direction of all toil. 
That chivalry, to the abuse and dishonor of which are 
attributable primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in 
peace, or corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations ; and to 
the original purity and power of which we owe the defense 
alike of faith, of law, and of love ; — that chivalry, I say, in 
its very first conception of honorable life, assumes the sub- 
jection of the young knight to the command — should it 
even be the command in caprice — of his lady. It assumes 
this, because its masters knew that the first and necessary 
impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart is this of 
blind service to its lady ; that where that true faith and 
captivity are not, all wayward and wicked passions must be,- 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of 
his youth, is the sanctincation of all man's strength, and 
the continuance of all his purposes. And this, not because 
such obedience would be safe, or honorable, were it ever 
rendered to the unworthy ; but because it ought to be 
impossible for every noble youth — it is impossible for 
every one rightly trained — to love any one whose gentle 
counsel he cannot trust, or whose prayerful command he 
can hesitate to obey. 

65. I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I 
think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge of 
what has been and to your feelings of what should be. You 
cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's armor by 
his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It 
is the type of an eternal truth — that the soul's armor is 
never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has 
braced it ; and it is only when she braces it loosely that 
the honor of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely 
lines — I would they were learned by all youthful ladies of 
England : — 

" Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
How has she cheapen'd Paradise ! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine, 
Which, spent with due, respective thrift, 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " 1 

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I 
believe you will accept. J>ut what we too often doubt is the 

1 Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too often or too care- 
fully; as far as I know he is the only living poet who always strengthens 
and purifies ; the others sometimes darken, and nearly always depress 
and discourage, the imagination they deeply seize. 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 8 I 

fitness of the continuance of such a relation throughout the 
whole of human life. We think it right in the lover and 
mistress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, we 
think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one whose 
affection we still doubt, and whose character we as yet do 
but partially and distantly discern ; and that this reverence 
and duty are to be withdrawn, when the affection has 
become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the character 
has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust 
it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how 
ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable ? Do you not 
feel that marriage, — when it is marriage at all, — is only 
the seal which marks the vowed transition of temporary into 
untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love ? 

67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding 
function of the woman reconcilable with a true wifely sub- 
jection ? Simply in that it is a guiding, not a determining, 
function. Let me try to show you briefly how these powers 
seem to be rightly distinguishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking 
of the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could 
be compared in similar things. Each has what the other 
has not : each completes the other, and is completed by the 
other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and 
perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving 
from the other what the other only can give. 

68. Now their separate characters are briefly these. The 
man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is emi- 
nently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. 
His intellect is for speculation and invention ; his energy 
for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is 
just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power 
is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for 
invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, 
and their places. Her great function is Praise : she enters 
into no contest, but infallibly judges the crown of contest. 
By her office, and place, she is protected from all dangei 
and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open 
world, must encounter all peril and trial : to him, there- 
fore, must be the failure, the offense, the inevitable error : 
often he must be wounded, or subdued ; often misled ; and 
always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this ; 
within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has 
sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause 
of error or offense. This is the true nature of home — it is 
the place of Peace ; the shelter, not only from all injury, 
but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is 
not this, it is not home : so far as the anxieties of the outer 
life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, un- 
known, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is 
allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, 
it ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of that outer 
world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But 
so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of 
the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose 
faces none may come but those whom they can receive with 
love, — so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only 
of a nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a 
weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea, — 
so far it vindicates the name, and fulfills the praise, of home. 
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
round her. The stars only may be over her head ; the 
glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at 
her foot : but home is yet wherever she is ; and for a noble 
woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, 
for those who else were homeless. 



of queens' gardens. 83 

69. This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to 
be, — the woman's true place and power? But do not you 
see that to fulfill this, she must — as far as one can use such 
terms of a human creature — be incapable of error? So far 
as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be 
enduringly, incorruptibly good ; instinctively, infallibly wise 
— wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation : 
wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but 
that she may never fail from his side : wise, not with the 
narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the 
passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because in- 
finitely applicable, modesty of service — the true changeful- 
ness of woman. In that great sense — "La donna e mobile," 
not "Qual piiim' al vento " ; no, nor yet "Variable as the 
shade, by the light quivering aspen made " ; but variable as 
the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that it may 
take the color of all that it falls upon, and exalt it. 

70. II. — I have been trying, thus far, to show you what 
should be the place, and what the power of woman. Now, 
secondly, we ask, What kind of education is to fit her for 
these ? 

And if you indeed think this is a true conception of her 
office and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course 
of education which would fit her for the one, and raise her 
to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons 
now doubt this — is to secure for her such physical training 
and exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her 
beauty, the highest refinement of that beauty being un- 
attainable without splendor of activity and of delicate 
strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its 
power ; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light 
too far: only remember that all physical freedom is vain to 
produce beauty without a corresponding freedom of heart. 



84 SESAME AND LILIES. 

There are two passages of that poet who is distinguished, 
it seems to me, from all others — not by power, but by 
exquisite rig/itness — which point you to the source, and 
describe to you, in a few syllables, the completion of 
womanly beauty. I will read the introductory stanzas, 
but the last is the one I wish you specially to notice : — 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take ; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 

A lady of my own. 



« . 



Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse ; and with me 

The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle, or restrain. 

" ■ The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her ; for her the willow bend ; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" ' And vital feelings of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height, 

Her virgin bosom swell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
While she and I together live, 
Here in this happy dell."' 1 

1 Observe, it is " Nature " who is speaking throughout, and who says, 
" While she and I together live." 



of queen's gardens. 85 

" Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
feelings of delight ; but the natural ones are vital, necessary 
to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do 
not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on 
a good girl's nature — there is not one check you give to 
her instincts of affection or of effort — which will not be 
indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is 
all the more painful because it takes away the brightness 
from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow 
of virtue. 

71. This for the means: now note the end. Take from 
the same poet, in two lines, a perfect description of womanly 
beauty — 

" A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can 
only consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in 
the memory of happy and useful years, — full of sweet 
records ; and from the joining of this with that yet more 
majestic childishness, which is still full of change and 
promise; — opening always — modest at once, and bright, 
with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed. 
There is no old age where there is still that promise. 

72. Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical 
frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, 
to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts 
which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and 
refine its natural tact of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable 
her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men : and 
yet it should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

were, or could be, for her an object to know ; but only to 
feel, and to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of 
pride or perfectness in herself, whether she knows many 
languages or one ; but it is of the utmost, that she should be 
able to show kindness to a stranger, and to understand the 
sweetness of a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to 
her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted 
with this science or that ; but it is of the highest that she 
should be trained in habits of accurate thought ; that she 
should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the 
loveliness of natural laws ; and follow at least some one 
path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold of 
that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the wisest 
and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves forever 
children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of 
little consequence how many positions of cities she knows, 
or how many dates of events, or names of celebrated 
persons - — it is not the object of education to turn a woman 
into a dictionary ; but it is deeply necessary that she should 
be taught to enter with her whole personality into the 
history she reads ; to picture the passages of it vitally in 
her own bright imagination ; to apprehend, with her fine 
instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations, 
which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning, 
and disconnects by his arrangement : it is for her to trace 
the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through 
the darkness, of the fatal threads of woven fire that connect 
error with its retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be 
taught to extend the limits of her sympathy with respect 
to that history which is being for her determined as the 
moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath : and 
to the contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly 
mourned by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is to 
exercise herself in imagining what would be the effects upon 



of queen's gardens. 87 

her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the 
presence of the suffering which is not the less real because 
shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to 
understand the nothingness of the proportion which that 
little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world 
in which God lives and loves ; — and solemnly she is to be 
taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble 
in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer 
more languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain 
of her husband or her child, when it is uttered for the 
multitudes of those who have none to love them, — and is, 
" for all who are desolate and oppressed." 

73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence ; 
perhaps you will not be with me in what I believe is most 
needful for me to say. There is one dangerous science for 
women — one which they must indeed beware how they 
profanely touch — that of theology. Strange, and miserably 
strange, that while they are modest enough to doubt their 
powers, and pause at the threshold of sciences where every 
step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong, 
and without one thought of incompetency, into that science 
in which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest 
erred. Strange, that they will complacently and pridefully 
bind up whatever vice or folly there is in them, whatever 
arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehensiveness, into 
one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. Strange, in 
creatures born to be Love visible, that where they can know 
least, they will condemn first, and think to recommend 
themselves to their Master, by scrambling up the steps of 
His judgment throne, to divide it with Him. Strangest of 
all, that they should think they were led by the Spirit of the 
Comforter into habits of mind which have become in them 
the unmixed elements of home discomfort ; and that they 
dare to turn the Household Gods of Christianity into ugly 



88 SESAME AND LILIES. 

idols of their own; — spiritual dolls, for them to dress 
according to their caprice ; and from which their husbands 
must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should be 
shrieked at for breaking them. 

74. I believe then, with this exception, that a girl's 
education should be nearly, in its course and material of 
study, the same as a boy's ; but quite differently directed. 
A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her 
husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different way. 
His command of it should be foundational and progressive ; 
hers, general and accomplished for daily and helpful use. 
Not but that it would often be wiser in men to learn things 
in a womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for 
the discipline and training of their mental powers in such 
branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social 
service ; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any 
language or science he learns, thoroughly — while a woman 
ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as 
may enable her to sympathize in her husband's pleasures, 
and in those of his best friends. 

75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she 
reaches. There is a wide difference between elementary 
knowledge and superficial knowledge — between a firm 
beginning, and an infirm attempt at compassing. A woman 
may always help her husband by what she knows, however 
little ; by what she half-knows, or mis-knows, she will only 
tease him. 

And indeed, if there were to be any difference between 
a girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two 
the girl should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, 
into deep and serious subjects : and that her range of 
literature should be, not more, but less frivolous ; calculated 
to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her 
natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit ; and 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 09 

also to keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. 
I enter not now into any question of choice of books ; only 
let us be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap 
as they fall out of the package of the circulating library, 
wet with the last and lightest spray of the fountain of 
folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with respect to 
that sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the badness 
of a novel that we should dread, so much as its over- 
wrought interest. The weakest romance is not so stupefying 
as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the 
worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false 
philosophy, or false political essays. But the best romance 
becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement, it renders the 
ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the 
morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which 
we shall never be called upon to act. 

77. I speak therefore of good novels only; and our 
modern literature is particularly rich in types of such. 
Well read, indeed, these books have serious use, being 
nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry ; 
studies of human nature in the elements of it. But I 
attach little weight to this function : they are hardly ever 
read with earnestness enough to permit them to fulfill it. 
The utmost they usually do is to enlarge somewhat the 
charity of a kind reader, or the bitterness of a malicious 
one ; for each will gather, from the novel, food for her own 
disposition. Those who are naturally proud and envious 
will learn from Thackeray to despise humanity ; those who 
are naturally gentle, to pity it ; those who are naturally 
shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might be a service- 
able power in novels to bring before us, in vividness, a 
human truth which we had before dimly conceived ; but 
the temptation to picturesqueness of statement is so great, 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that often the best writers of fiction cannot resist it ; and 
our views are rendered so violent and one-sided, that their 
vitality is rather a harm than good. 

78. Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
decision of how much novel-reading should be allowed, let 
me at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, 
or history be read, they should be chosen, not for their free- 
dom from evil, but for their possession of good. The 
chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or 
hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a 
noble girl ; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, 
and his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical books, there 
need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine 
and novel out of your girl's way ; turn her loose into the 
old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find 
what is good for her ; you cannot ; for there is just this 
difference between the making of a girl's character and a 
boy's — you may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a 
rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as 
you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a 
girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, — she will 
wither without sun ; she will decay in her sheath, as the 
narcissus will, if you do not give her air enough ; she may 
fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her without 
help at some moments of her life ; but you cannot fetter 
her ; she must take her own fair form and way, if she take 
any, and in mind as in body, must have always — 

" Her household motions light and free 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a 
field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than 
you ; and the good ones, too, and will eat some bitter and 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 9 1 

prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest 
thought would have been so. 

79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and 
let her practice in all accomplishments to be accurate and 
thorough, so as to enable her to understand more than 
she accomplishes. I say the finest models — that is to say, 
the truest, simplest, usefullest. Note those epithets ; they 
will range through all the arts. Try them in music, where 
you might think them the least applicable. I say the 
truest, that in which the notes most closely and faithfully 
express the meaning of the words, or the character of 
intended emotion ; again, the simplest, that in which the 
meaning and melody are attained with the fewest and most 
significant notes possible ; and, finally, the usefullest, that 
music which makes the best words most beautiful, which 
enchants them in our memories each with its own glory of 
sound, and which applies them closest to the heart at the 
moment we need them. 

80. An,d not only in the material and in the course, but 
yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education 
be as serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they 
were meant for sideboard ornament, and then complain of 
their frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you 
give their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts of 
virtue in them ; teach them, also, that courage and truth are 
the pillars of their being ; — do you think that they would 
not answer that appeal, brave and true as they are even 
now, when you know that there is hardly a girl's school in 
this Christian kingdom where the children's courage or 
sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as 
their way of coming in at a door ; and when the whole 
system of society, as respects the mode of establishing them 
in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture — ■ 
cowardice, in not daring to let them live, or love, except as 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

their neighbors choose ; and imposture, in bringing, for the 
purpose of our own pride, the full glow of the world's worst 
vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole 
happiness of her future existence depends upon her remain- 
ing undazzled ? 

8 1. And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but 
noble teachers. You consider somewhat, before you send 
your boy to school, what kind of a man the master is ; — 
whatsoever kind of a man he is, you at least give him full 
authority over your son, and show some respect for him 
yourself ; — if he comes to dine with you, you do not put 
him at a side table ; you know, also, that at his college, 
your child's immediate tutor will be under the direction of 
some still higher tutor, for whom you have absolute rever- 
ence. You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the 
Master of Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what 
reverence do you show to the teachers you have chosen ? 
Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own 
intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire 
formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a 
person whom you let your servants treat with less respect 
than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul of your 
child were a less charge than jams and groceries), and 
whom you yourself think you confer an honor upon 
by letting her sometimes sit in the drawing-room in 
the evening? 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help, and thus of art. 
There is one more help which we cannot do without — one 
which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other 
influences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. 
Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc : — 

" The education of this poor girl was mean according to 
the present standard ; was ineffably grand, according to a 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 93 

purer philosophic standard ; and only not good for our age, 
because for us it would be unattainable. . . . 

" Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domremy 
was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted 
to that degree by fairies, that the parish priest (cure) was 
obliged to read mass there once a year, in order to keep 
them in any decent bounds. . . . 

" But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories of 
the land ; for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient 
secrets that towered into tragic strength. ' Abbeys there 
were, and abbey windows,' — 'like Moorish temples of the 
Hindoos,' that exercised even princely power both in 
Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their sweet 
bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or 
vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, 
and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no 
degree to disturb the deep solitude of the region; yet 
many enough to spread a network or awning of Chris- 
tian sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen 
wilderness." l 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods 
eighteen miles deep to the centre ; but you can, perhaps, 
keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to 
keep them. But do you wish it ? Suppose you had each, 
at the back of your houses, a garden large enough for your 
children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give 
them room to run, — no more — and that you could not 
change your abode ; but that, if you chose, you could double 
your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal-shaft in the 
middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps 
of coke. Would you do it ? I hope not. I can tell you, 

1 " Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's History of France.' 1 
De Quincey's Works, Vol. Ill, page 217. 



94 SESAME AND LILIES. 

you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income 
sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all England. 
The whole country is but a little garden, not more than 
enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you 
would let them all run there. And this little garden you 
will turn into furnace-ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, 
if you can ; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer 
for it. For the fairies will not be all banished ; there are 
fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts 
seem to be " sharp arrows of the mighty " ; but their last 
gifts are " coals of juniper." 

84. And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my 
subject that I feel more — press this upon you; for we 
made so little use of the power of nature while we had it, 
that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the 
other side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon, and 
your Menai Straits, and that mighty granite rock beyond 
the moors of Anglesea, splendid in its heatherly crest, and 
foot planted in the deep sea, once thought of as sacred — 
a divine promontory, looking westward ; the Holy Head or 
Headland, still not without awe when its red light glares 
first through storm. These are the hills, and these the 
bays and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would 
have been always loved, always fateful in influence on the 
national mind. That Snowdon is your Parnassus ; but 
where are its Muses ? That Holyhead mountain is your 
Island of zEgina, but where is its Temple to Minerva ? 

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had 
achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus, up to the 
year 1848 ? — Here is a little account of a Welsh school, 
from page 261 of the report on Wales, published by the 
Committee of Council on Education. This is a school 
close to a town containing 5,000 persons : — 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 95 

" I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 
recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly 
declared that they had never heard of Christ, and two 
that they had never heard of God. Two out of six 
thought Christ was on earth now (' they might have had 
a worse thought, perhaps ')' ; three knew nothing about 
the crucifixion. Four out of seven did not know the 
names of the months, nor the number of days in a year. 
They had no notion of addition beyond two and two, or 
three and three ; their minds were perfect blanks." 

Oh, ye women of England ! from the Princess of that 
Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your own children 
can be brought into their true fold of rest while these are 
scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And 
do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of 
their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which 
God made at once for their school-room and their play- 
ground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize 
them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you 
baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great 
Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks of your 
native land — waters which a Pagan would have worshiped 
in their purity, and you only worship with pollution. You 
cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow axe- 
hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars 
in heaven — the mountains that sustain your island throne, 

— mountains on which a Pagan would have seen the powers 
of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud — remain for you 
without inscription ; altars built, not to, but by, an Unknown 
God. 

86. III. — Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the 
teaching, of woman, and thus of her household orifice, and 
queenliness. We come now to our last, our widest question, 

— What is her queenly office with respect to the state ? 



g6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Generally we are under an impression that a man's 
duties are public, and a woman's private. But this is not 
altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating 
to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the 
expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman 
has a personal work and duty, relating to her own home, 
and a public work and duty, which is also the expansion 
of that. 

Now the man's work for his own home is, as has been 
said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defense ; 
the woman's to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as a 
member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, 
in the advance, in the defense of the state. The woman's 
duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the 
ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment 
of the state. 

When the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need 
be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in 
a more devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his 
country, leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, 
to do his more incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within her 
gates, as the center of order, the balm of distress, and the 
mirror of beauty ; that she is also to be without her gates, 
where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveli- 
ness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is always set an 
instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you 
cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you with- 
draw it from its true purpose ; — as there is the intense 
instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined, maintains all 
the sanctities of life, and, misdirected, undermines them ; 
and must do either the one or the other ; — so there is in 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 97 

the human heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of 
power, which, rightly directed, maintains all the majesty 
of law and life, and misdirected, wrecks them. 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of 
man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and 
God keeps it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or 
rebuke the desire of power ! — For Heaven's sake, and 
for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But what power? 
That is all the question. Power to destroy? the lion's 
limb, and the dragon's breath ? Not so. Power to heal, 
to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power of the scepter 
and shield ; the power of the royal hand that heals in 
touching, — that binds the fiend and looses the captive ; 
the throne that is founded on the rock of Justice, and 
descended from only by steps of mercy. Will you not 
covet such power as this, and seek such throne as this, 
and be no more housewives, but queens ? 

88. It is now long since the women of England arro- 
gated, universally, a title which once belonged to nobility 
only, and, having once been in the habit of accepting the 
simple title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of 
gentleman, insisted on the privilege of assuming the title 
of "Lady," 1 which properly corresponds only to the title 
of "Lord." 

I do not blame them for this ; but only for their narrow 
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the 
title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but 

1 I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English 
youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a 
given age, their knighthood and ladyhood by true title; attainable only 
by certain probation and trial both of character and accomplishment ; 
and to be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonorable 
act. Such an institution would be entirely, and with all noble results, 
possible, in a nation which loved honor. That it would not be possible 
among us is not to the discredit of the scheme. 



98 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the office and duty signified by it. Lady means "bread- 
giver" or "loaf-giver," and Lord means " maintainer of 
laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which 
is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given 
to the household, but to law maintained for the multitude, 
and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord 
has legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the main- 
tainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords ; and a Lady has 
legal claim to her title only so far as she communicates that 
help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women 
once, ministering to Him of their substance, were permitted 
to extend to that Master Himself ; and when she is known, 
as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power 
of the Dominus, or House Lord, and of the Domina, or 
House-Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number of 
those through whom it has lineally descended, but in the 
number of those whom it grasps within its sway ; it is 
always regarded with reverent worship wherever its dynasty 
is founded on its duty, and its ambition co-relative with its 
beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the thought of 
being noble ladies, with a train of vassals. Be it so : you 
cannot be too noble, and your train cannot be too great ; 
but see to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve 
and feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed you ; and 
that the multitude which obeys you is of those whom you 
have comforted, not oppressed, — whom you have redeemed, 
not led into captivity. 

90. And this, which is true of the lower or household 
dominion, is equally true of the queenly dominion ; — that 
highest dignity is opened to you, if you will also accept that 
highest duty. Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine — "Right- 
doers " ; they differ but from the Lady and Lord, in that 
their power is supreme over the mind as over the person — 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. 99 

that they not only feed and clothe, but direct and teach. 
And whether consciously or not, you must be, in many a 
heart, enthroned : there is no putting by that crown ; queens 
you must always be ; queens to your lovers ; queens to 
your husbands and your sons ; queens of higher mystery to 
the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, 
before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter, of 
womanhood. But, alas ! you are too often idle and care- 
less queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while 
you abdicate it in the greatest ; and leaving misrule and 
violence to work their will among men, in defiance of the 
power, which, holding straight in gift from the Prince of 
all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and the good 
forget. 

91. " Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings 
rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, 
they also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, 
receive the power of it. There are no other rulers than 
they : other rule than theirs is but ////mile ; they who govern 
verily " Dei gratia " are all princes, yes, or princesses, of 
peace. There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injus- 
tice, but you women are answerable for it ; not in that you 
have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, 
by their nature, are prone to fight ; they will fight for any 
cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for 
them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is 
no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the 
guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but 
you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down 
without sympathy in their own struggle ; but men are feeble 
in sympathy, and contracted in hope ; it is you only who 
can feel the depths of pain ; and conceive the way of its 
healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away from 
it ; you shut yourselves within your park walls and garden 



IOO SESAME AND LILIES. 

gates ; and you are content to know that there is beyond 
them a whole world in wilderness — a world of secrets 
which you dare not penetrate ; and of suffering which you 
dare not conceive. 

92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing 
among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no 
depths to which, when once warped from its honor, that 
humanity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's 
death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do 
not wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped 
about his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed 
murder of a single victim, done by the assassin in the 
darkness of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I 
do not even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multi- 
tudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of 
nations, and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt, heaped 
up from hell to heaven, of their priests, and kings. But 
this is wonderful to me — oh, how wonderful ! — to see the 
tender and delicate woman among you, with her child at 
her breast, and a power, if she would wield it, over it, and 
over its father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger 
than the seas of earth — nay, a magnitude of blessing which 
her husband would not part with for all that earth itself, 
though it were made of one entire and perfect chrysolite : — 
to see her abdicate this majesty to play at precedence with 
her next-door neighbor ! This is wonderful — oh, wonder- 
ful ! — to see her, with every innocent feeling fresh within 
her, go out in the morning into her garden to play with the 
fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when 
they are drooping, with her happy smile upon her face, and 
no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall around 
her place of peace : and yet she knows, in her heart, if she 
would only look for its knowledge, that, outside of that 
little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is 



OF QUEENS GARDENS. IOI 

torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of 
their life blood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep under mean- 
ing there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, in our 
custom of strewing flowers before those whom we think 
most happy ? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive them 
into the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in 
showers at their feet ? — that wherever they pass they will 
tread on herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough ground 
will be made smooth for them by depth of roses ? So 
surely as they believe that, they will have, instead, to walk 
on bitter herbs and thorns ; and the only softness to their 
feet will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they 
should believe ; there is a better meaning in that old 
custom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with 
flowers : but they rise behind her steps, not before them. 
" Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies 
rosy." 

94. You think that only a lover's fancy;- — false and 
vain ! How if it could be true ? You think this also, 
perhaps, only a poet's fancy — ■ 

" Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
destroy where she passes. She should revive ; the hare- 
bells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think 
I am rushing into wild hyperbole ? Pardon me, not a whit 
— I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute 
truth. You have heard it said — (and I believe there is 
more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a 
fanciful one) — that flowers only flourish rightly in the 
garden of some one who loves them. I know you would 



102 SESAME AND LILIES. 

like that to be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic if 
you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind 
look upon them : nay, more, if your look had the power, 
not only to cheer, but to guard them ; — if you could bid 
the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare 
— if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, 
and say to the south wind, in frost — "Come, thou south, 
and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow 
out." This you would think a great thing ? And do you 
think it not a greater thing, that all this (and how much 
more than this !) you can do, for fairer flowers than these — 
flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, and 
will love you for having loved them ; — flowers that have 
thoughts like yours, and lives like yours ; which, once saved, 
you save forever ? Is this only a little power ? Far among 
the moorlands and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the 
terrible streets, — these feeble florets are lying, with all their 
fresh leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you never 
go down to them, nor set them in order in their little 
fragrant beds, nor fence them in their trembling from the 
fierce wind ? Shall morning follow morning, for you, but 
not for them ; and the dawn rise to watch, far away, those 
frantic Dances of Death ; * but no dawn rise to breathe 
upon these living banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and 
rose; nor call to you, through your casement, — call (not 
giving you the name of the English poet's lady, but the 
name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy 
Lethe, stood x wreathing flowers with flowers), saying : — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown." 

1 See note, p. 43. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. IO3 

Will you not go down among them ? — among those sweet 
living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth 
with the deep color of heaven upon it, is starting up in 
strength of goodly spire ; and whose purity, washed from 
the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of prom- 
ise ; — and still they turn to you, and for you, "The Lark- 
spur listens — I hear, I hear! And the Lily whispers — I 
wait." 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read 
you that first stanza ; and think that I had forgotten them ? 
Hear them now : — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown. 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this 
sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you ? Did you ever hear, 
not of a Maude, but a Madeleine, who went down to her 
garden in the dawn, and found one waiting at the gate, 
whom she supposed to be the gardener ? Have you not 
sought Him often ; — sought Him in vain, all through the 
night ; — sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden 
where the fiery sword is set ? He is never there ; but at 
the gate of this garden He is waiting always — waiting to 
take your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the 
pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him the 
little tendrils of the vines that His hand is guiding — there 
you shall see the pomegranate springing where His hand 
cast the sanguine seed ; — more : you shall see the troops 
of the angel keepers, that, with their wings, wave away the 
hungry birds from the path sides where He has sown, and 
call to each other between the vineyard rows, " Take us the 



104 SESAME AND LILIES. 

foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines 
have tender grapes." Oh — you queens — you queens; 
among the hills and happy greenwood of this land of yours, 
shall the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have 
nests ; and in your cities, shall the stones cry out against 
you, that they are the only pillows where the Son of Man 
can lay His head ? 



ANNOTATIONS. 



51. Spectral: merely having the appearance of ; unreal. 

The likeness of a kingly crown have on : these words are 
borrowed from Milton's description of death. — " Paradise Lost," 
Book II. 

56. Orlando and Ros'alind: characters in Shakespeare's play 
"As You Like It." 

CordeTia: banished daughter of King Lear. 

DesdemOn'a : heroine of the drama " Othello." 

Isabella: a character in " Measure for Measure." 

Hermione: the wife, and Perdita, the daughter of Leontes, 
King of Sicily, in " A Winter's Tale." 

Im'ogen : heroine of the drama " Cymbeline." 

Queen Katherine: first wife of Henry VIII, and heroine of the 
drama " Henry VIII." 

Silvia : the lady beloved by Valentine in " Two Gentlemen of 
Verona." 

Viola : heroine of the drama " Twelfth Night." 

HeTena : heroine of " All's Well that Ends Well." 

Virgilia: wife of Coriolanus, in Shakespeare's play of that 
name. 

Julia : a character in " Two Gentlemen of Verona." 

Hero and Beatrice : characters in the drama " Much Ado 
About Nothing." 

The unlessoned girl : Portia, in " Merchant of Venice." She 
uses these words concerning herself. 



ANNOTATIONS. 105 

57. Emilia : wife of Iago, in Shakespeare's play " Othello." 

58. Ophelia : heroine of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." 

Lady Macbeth : wife of Macbeth, in Shakespeare's drama. 
Regan and Goneril : sisters of Cordelia and daughters of King Lear. 

59. Dandle Din'mont : an eccentric character in Scott's novel 
"Guy Mannering." 

Rob Roy : hero of Scott's story of the same name. 

Clav'erhouse : a character in "The Bride of Lammermoor." 

Ellen Douglas: heroine of Scott's " Lady of the Lake." 

Flora Maclvor : heroine of " Waverley." 

Rose Bradwardine: a character in "Waverley." 

Catherine Seyton : a character in " The Abbot." 

Dian'a Vernon : heroine of " Rob Roy." 

Lilias Redgauntlet : a character in Scott's story " Redgauntlet." 

Alice Bridgenorth : heroine of " Peveril of the Peak." 

Alice Lee : a character in " Woodstock." 

Jeanie Deans: a character in " Heart of Midlothian." 

60. A love poe?n to his dead lady : Be'atrice, to whom the poet 
Dante had been deeply attached, died in her 24th year. Dante's 
love for her became to him a source of poetic inspiration, and he 
represents her as his guide in the " Paradiso." 

Dan'te Rossett'i: a distinguished artist and poet, and a per- 
sonal friend of Ruskin. 

61. Andromache (An-drom'-a-ke) : wife of Hector, a Trojan 
hero in the " Iliad." 

Cassan'dra : daughter of Priam, King of Troy. She was gifted 
with the power of prophecy,* but Apollo, whom she had offended, 
cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions. 

Nausic'aa : daughter of the King of the Phoea'cians, whose 
court was visited by Ulysses in his wanderings (" Odyssey "). She 
is a type of maidenly purity. 

PeneTo-pe : wife of Ulysses, — type of wifely constancy. 

Antig'one: heroine of Sophocles' drama of that name, — type 
of filial devotion. 

Iphigenia (If-i-gen-ra) : daughter of Agamemnon, leader of the 
Greeks in the Trojan war, who offered her as a sacrifice to. pro- 
pitiate the offended goddess Diana. 



106 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Alces'tis : wife of Adme'tus, to save whose life she offered to die. 
Hercules brought her to life and restored her to her husband. 

62. Una : an allegorical character in Spenser's " Faery Queene." 
She represents Truth. 

Brit'omart: a character in the same poem. She typifies 
Chastity. 

Lawgiver of all the earth : Moses, who was adopted by an 
Egyptian princess, daughter of Pharoah. — See Exodus ii. 5-10. 

Athe'na: see Annotations to Kings' Treasuries, 45. 

The Egyptian ' Spirit of Wisdom ' is the goddess A T eith. 

Aeschylus (Es'-ke-lus): a celebrated tragic dramatist of Greece. 

68. A Vestal temple : a temple sacred to Vesta, goddess of the 
hearth, and therefore dedicated to purity and peace. 

Pharos : a lighthouse built on an island at the entrance of the 
port of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the wonders of the ancient 
world. 

69. "La donna e mobile''''', woman is changeable. 

" Qual pi'um' al vcnto ": like a feather in the wind. 
"Variable as the shade," etc.: see Scott's " Marmion," Canto 
vi. Stanza 30. 

70. That poet who is distinguished, etc. : Wordsworth. 

71. The lines quoted are from Wordsworth's poem entitled 
" She was a Phantom of Delight." 

8 1 . Christ Church : one of the colleges forming the University 
of Oxford. 

Trinity : one of the colleges belonging to the University of 
Cambridge. 

82. Joan of Arc : the French peasant girl of Domre'my whose 
courage and enthusiasm enabled her to lead the French troops to 
victory over the English invaders (1402 a.d.). 

Touraine: a province of France. 

German Diets : legislative bodies in Germany are called Diets. 

84. Snowdon : the highest mountain in Wales (3571 feet). 

Holy Head : a seaport town on an island west of the island of 
Anglesea, with which it is e-onnected by a causeway. 

Parnas'sus : a mountain in Greece, believed to be a favorite 
haunt of Apollo and the Muses. 



ANNOTATIONS. 107 

Island of Aegi'na: an island of Greece, sixteen miles from 
Athens, anciently celebrated for its magnificent temples. 

Minerva : Roman name for Athena, goddess of wisdom. 

87. Power of the royal hand that heals in touching: an 
allusion to the belief formerly current in England that the sov- 
ereign had the gift of healing by a touch. 

90. Rex et Regi'na (Latin) and Roi et Reine (French) for king 
and queen. Derived from the Latin verb regere, to direct or 
guide straight ; hence right. 

91. Deigra'tia: by the grace of God. 

93. " Her feet have touched the meadows" etc. • -from Tenny- 
son's " Maud." 

94. The lines quoted are from Scott's " Lady of the Lake," 
Canto i. Stanza 18. 

Dances of Death : pleasures of a life of dissipation. 

Matil'da: an Italian countess, benefactress of the Church. 
Matilda (Dante) and Maud (Tennyson) are really the same 
name. 

Lethe : in Greek mythology, a river of the underworld, a drink 
of whose waters caused forgetfulness of the past. Dante, how- 
ever, attributed to its waters a double power : — 

" Power to take away 
Remembrance of offence " — and — " to bring 
Remembrance back of every good deed done." 

Purgatorio xxix. 134. 

" Come into the garden, Maud" etc. : quoted from Tennyson's 
poem " Maud." 

95. Madeleine: same as Magdalene. See John xx. 20. 

That old garden where the fiery sword is set: see Genesis 
iii. 24. 

Sanguine seed : the seeds of the pomegranate seem to be blood- 
red in color. Sanguine is derived from the Latin sanguis, blood. 

" Take us the foxes" etc. See Song of Solomon ii. 15. 



OCT ♦ 1905 



